Before the Weather Turns: Four Ways Boone County Will Help You Get Ready This Fall

We watched a front come through this week — the kind that hands you a heat index of 105 in the afternoon and two inches of rain by morning. That’s a good reminder that the season is turning, and that the county has a stretch of preparedness events coming up between now and October.

Rocheport sits in Boone County, which means the county’s Office of Emergency Management programs are ours to use. Four of them are worth putting on the calendar.

The Ready Festival, Thursday the 17th

The sixth annual Boone County Ready Festival runs Thursday, Sept. 17, from 3 to 7 p.m. at the Lamb Shelter in Cosmo Park. According to the Boone County Office of Emergency Management, it’s a community-wide event with food, crafts, live music, and activities for all ages, built around recognizing the people who work in response and preparedness. If the weather doesn’t cooperate, the county has already set a rain date: Thursday, Oct. 1, same time, same place.

The festival is also when the Tom S. Hurley Public Safety Service Award is recognized. The selection committee is a fair snapshot of who actually shows up when something goes wrong around here — the Office of Emergency Management, Boone Health, the Boone County Fire Protection District, the Ashland Police Department, Missouri River Relief, the Truman VA Hospital, and Hurley’s own family and friends.

Sign up for the alerts before you need them

The county runs its alert system as Boone County Ready, powered by Smart911. You create a safety profile, register for emergency notifications, and choose whether to share that information with emergency management. It takes a few minutes and it is the single easiest thing on this list.

It’s worth reading the county’s own hazard list while you’re there, because it is not the list most people would guess. Boone County names earthquakes, extreme heat, flooding, hazardous materials, lightning, severe weather, tornadoes, wildfires, and winter weather. Down here between the bluffs and the bottoms, flooding and severe weather are the two we watch most, but the rest are on the list for a reason. The county also has guidance for households preparing with children, or with people who have disabilities or functional needs.

CERT training, if you want to be useful

The Community Emergency Response Team program trains ordinary residents to help their own neighborhoods in the window after a disaster — the hours before outside help arrives. Boone County’s CERT Basic Training registration is open to Boone County residents 18 and older, and you can take the course either in person or online. The registration form asks for the basics and which format you want. For class dates and any cost, the office is at em@boonemo.gov or 573-554-7900, at 2145 County Drive in Columbia.

A free workshop for congregations, Oct. 7

This one has a deadline attached. The Office of Emergency Management is offering a free Faithful Readiness Workshop on Oct. 7, in partnership with the American Red Cross and other agencies. It’s built for people from faith communities: what threats and hazards houses of worship are actually seeing, and how a congregation can help when its own community gets hit. Registration closes Sept. 30.

Small towns lean on their churches when the power is out and somebody needs a warm room and a hot meal. If you’re the person at your church who ends up organizing that anyway, this is the workshop with your name on it. The office publishes a quarterly preparedness newsletter as well, and will add you to it at that same email address.

None of this is dramatic. It’s a Thursday afternoon in a park, a form on a county website, and an email sent before the end of the month. But the time to do all three is now, while the worst thing on the forecast is rain.