Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - In the aftermath of the deadly Buffalo blizzard, one Buffalo Common councilman is looking deeper into maximizing communication and efficiency in preparation when it comes to emergency response.
"I think it's incumbent upon all of us to really look inward into answer questions and to see how we can do better moving forward," Councilman Mitch Nowakowski told WBEN's BMaz and Beamer on Friday.
"I think the first thing is, that I'm very focused on, is the emergency manager position. I co-sponsored a resolution with my colleague, Chris Scanlon to see where we could better develop emergency response," Councilman Nowakowski says.
The councilman mentions that a warming shelter in his district was without power because they weren't supplied with a second generator and he also mentions call centers, which were not able to effectively handle the call volumes during the storm, "858-SNOW had gotten 21,000 calls. So I believe that 311 number was activated during the emergency response. A lot of those calls could have went to 311, it could have addressed a lot of non-emergency needs to give folks updates throughout the duration of the storm."
Councilman Nowakowski says it would be beneficial to have an Emergency Manager who can be designated to solve issues like this and direct response people to aid in situations as the National Guard has a position equivalent to this as well as other local towns, "The town of Hamburg, the town of Amherst and I even believe that the town of Newstead has a full-time emergency manager. As the second largest city in the state of New York, we really should have someone full-time that's coordinating these responses. Someone who's preparing city departments, coming up with a coordinated plan. They could also work with the newest and latest training and technology to not only train our staff, police and fire for search and rescue, there's always new equipment. There's always new way of trainings and doing things and we really should stay on top of it and strive to have the best response possible."
Another priority for the councilman would be alerting the neighborhood more effectively to get cars of the streets for effectively plowing efforts, "I would have liked to see maybe more of like an Amber Alert situation during the storm that says, 'Please shelter in place during that drive ban.' I think it's super important that throughout the day, we're telling people please shelter in place, please stay wherever you are, please stay off the road in hoping that that would reduce the amount of vehicles that were found stranded in the city of Buffalo."
For Councilman Nowakowski, he says the critical piece of putting all these efforts in motion would be the continued efforts of all levels of government, "When you're in an emergency situation, you really need to have everyone in the room and have really a consolidated approach that's effective and efficient. Everyone looks at it differently, from their chair of government because they all have different resources and, and different ways to respond. So being able to bring that all together to kind of streamline it, I think, is just extremely important to the residents of the City of Buffalo.
Click here to see Councilman Nowakowski's letter to the mayor with questions regarding the 2022 Buffalo blizzard.
