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Marion County emergency manager outlines weather tracking, Everbridge alerts and ‘what3words’ for remote rescues
Summary
Marion County Emergency Management Director Marcy Hostetler told the Hillsborough City Council the office focuses on weather monitoring, interagency coordination and public alerts; she urged residents to sign up for Everbridge and demonstrated the what3words location app for locating callers in remote areas.
Marcy Hostetler, Marion County emergency management director, told the Hillsborough City Council the core job of her office is coordination and preparedness — not frontline ambulance response — and that the county’s emergency managers “are the puzzle piece between what we have in the county and what we need in the county.”
Hostetler and Deputy Director Dan Schafer described daily weather monitoring, interagency coordination with fire, law enforcement, EMS and dispatch, and damage-report collection required to support local disaster declarations and state reimbursement. “We sent out a message to the schools warning them that they may have rain coming in when they were letting the schools out,” she said, citing an example of routine alerts.
Hostetler highlighted two public-facing tools she said residents should use: Everbridge, the county’s mass-notification system, and the location service what3words. “This is what sends out emergency alerts for the county,” she said of Everbridge, and she advised residents to sign up (the handout contains a QR code). She described what3words as a free app that maps the globe into brief three-word location codes that help dispatchers find people who are in rural areas or on the county reservoir: “You don’t have to have an address.”
Council members asked about day-to-day coordination with the Hillsborough Police Department and about exercises. Hostetler said the county’s Emergency Response Leadership Board meets regularly, the county runs mock emergency-operation-center exercises (for example during the Hillsborough Arts & Crafts event) and the office also helps arrange training such as landing-zone classes with hospital partners.
Hostetler also described operational responsibilities such as contacting the Red Cross after structure fires and researching grants (including an awarded grant to encrypt law-enforcement radio traffic). She closed by offering contact information and printed handouts of preparedness resources.
The presentation concluded with council thanks for the briefing and a commitment by staff to post the Everbridge and what3words material for public awareness.
