EATON — According to Preble County EMA Director David Anderson, the county mitigation plans are well under way. There will be two kick-off meetings held on Tuesday, Oct. 3 to hash out details. There will be one meeting at 3 p.m. and the other at 6 p.m. Both will be held at Eaton Fire Station Two.

“We will be sending out letters to everybody that will be good to have there. Whether they can make it or not is a different story, but we’re going to give it our best shot,” Anderson said. “We’re going to get everything started on doing the mitigation plan. We’ll go from there.”

The Ohio and Indiana Communication Exercise is also coming up. It will be held on Thursday, Oct. 5. Anderson noted, this exercise has taken a year’s worth of work on Ohio’s and Indiana’s part.

“This will better communications between the imaginary border which is the state line. We did some testing last month. At the end of the month they found a couple of glitches, hopefully we’ll have those worked out. Everything should be good to go and hopefully we’ll have good communication between Indiana and Ohio from there,” he said.

“The nice part is that both State EMAs are involved in this,” Anderson continued. “They will have people from the state at different sites along the borders watching this. The most important thing I will be looking for is the After Action Report (AAR). This is where we will find out what worked and what didn’t — not only from here, but from other ones up the state line. This is going from Butler County all the way up the Michigan border. All the counties in between will be involved in this, one way or another.”

Anderson is still working on the Preble County Master Asset List. It is getting closer to being completed, but is a very daunting task, he noted.

In Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) news, the compliance report will be done by the end of the week. There is also a yearly LEPC Conference upcoming.

As for Preble County CERT, the group has assisted with the car show and the Pork Festival parade. Normally it would do walk-arounds during the festival, but instead CERT members helped prepare supplies for disaster victims from Hurricane Harvey and Irma.