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After planning for natural and manmade events, emergency management director will need a contingency for retirement

By GORDON D. FIEDLER JR.

Salina Journal

Bryan Armstrong divides his emergency management career into two distinct periods: before Sept. 11, 2001, and after.

"Prior to 9-11," said the Saline County Emergency Management director, "about all we had to worry about was severe weather, tornadoes, floods, blizzards, ice storms and an occasional chemical spill."

His professional world changed that tragic Tuesday morning when he, as did most Americans, watched as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center became the targets of two fuel-laden jet liners.

"I was so overwhelmed shortly after we saw the second plane hit," he said.

"I got a call from the state that every plane in the skies over Kansas was coming to Salina," he said.

The municipal airport, a former Strategic Air Command base with a 13,000-foot runway, was among the logical choices to ground all planes once the enormity of the Twin Towers attack was fully grasped.

Armstrong and his department scrambled and alerted other services in the city to gear up for, well, he wasn't sure.

"We didn't know what to anticipate," Armstrong said. "We didn't know if we would have one plane with 200 people or 10 planes with 200 people."

Armstrong said the city got lucky, with only three unscheduled landings, none a passenger airliner.

"We would have handled it," he said, "but it wouldn't have been pretty."

Although Armstrong's department was spared having to deal with planeloads of grumpy passengers, it did learn a lesson from Garden City, which accommodated two jumbo jets.

"They managed to get them down, but they didn't have anything to get the people off the (planes)," he said.

The airlines refused to deploy the emergency chutes -- according to Armstrong, those inflatable slides require several days to reinstall -- so Garden City called in its fire department's ladder truck.

Now, Armstrong said, if a large passenger plane finds its way, for whatever reason, to the Salina Airport, Armstrong's first call will be to summon a fire department ladder truck.

However, if such a need arises after 5 p.m. this Friday, it won't be Armstrong making the call.

Come the 26th, Armstrong won't have to worry about natural or man-made disasters or big planes landing at the local airport, because after 13 years in the business, he is retiring.

Well, sort of. He'll be past president of the Kansas Emergency Management Association and will still have a seat on the North-Central Regional Council.

"I will miss the people," Armstrong said. "The people are a great group to work with."

Armstrong has led the department for six years and was the deputy director for seven years.

Before that, he was career military, a 27-year veteran of the Army.

He was a courier for a local medical lab when he spied the ad for the county job.

"It wasn't challenging," he said of the delivery job.

But the emergency management position looked like something he could handle after his light weapons infantry training in the Army.

"A lot was in planning, training and operations," he said of his military experience. "(The emergency management job) looked like great variety."

On that point, he was correct.

"It's never boring," he said.

Up to Sept. 11, 2001, Armstrong thought he had all disaster contingencies covered, including floods involving water.

He wasn't prepared for the flood of paperwork that inundated his department in the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.

Within three months, his office was awash in federal mandates that bumped various elements of terrorism to the top of the risk assessment roster. For this area, agriculture terrorism was a concern, of course, but so were threats from CBRNE -- chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives.

"For six years, the focus was on some type of an attack," Armstrong said.

The one-size-fits-all feature of the regulations was a point of contention, he said.

"A lot of us were frustrated," he said.

"We weren't so worried about smallpox as about SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and flu. So we tailored what we really expected to happen."

Armstrong's department kept a contingency plan on each disaster, as required. The county's single plan morphed into six plans. But now, it is merging back to one plan, he said.

Except for his continued involvement in emergency management organizations, Armstrong said he's finally saying goodbye to the workforce.

" I've retired twice. I'm hoping this one will stick."

nGordon D. Fiedler Jr. can be reached at 822-1407 or by e-mail at gfiedler@salina.com.

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