NWS: Cocopah Tribe weather-ready
System provides information in case of crisis
As dust storms, heat waves and the occasional thunder storm heads toward Yuma County, the Cocopah Indian Tribe has taken steps to step up their preparedness.
Recently, the tribe has been certified by the National Weather Service as being both a Weather Ready Nation and Storm-Ready.
Director of communications with the Cocopah Indian Tribe Jonathon Athens said that they are the first tribe in the state of Arizona to have earned both designations.
The designations follow the tribe’s launch of their emergency management application in winter of this year. The application is for mobile devices and it provides real-time data on weather, disasters, hazardous material and other critical information one may need to know in the event of a crisis.
Weather Ready Nation Ambassadors are to serve as change agents and leaders in their community. The National Weather Service web page for ambassadors states a Weather Ready Nation Ambassador is to “inspire others to be better informed and prepared.”
“About a year ago we sought the designation of
Weather Ambassador,” said Michael Fila, Cocopah emergency manager. “That just meant that we were sharing information and updates that come from the National Weather Service to the community and we did that through social media.”
In order to be officially Storm-Ready, the National Weather Service maintains that a community must establish a 24-hour warning point and emergency operations center, have more than one way to receive severe weather warnings and forecasts and to alert the public, promote the importance of public readiness through community seminars and develop a formal hazardous weather plan which includes training severe weather spotters and holding emergency exercises.
“We wanted to do something a little bit more challenging,” Fila said. “What we did is we went down the road to being Storm-Ready, and that just means that the government of the Cocopah Indian Tribe has sought the need make sure that weather forecasts and warnings are critical for the community. We put in place a couple of different measures. When we got the designations and because we were already a Weather Ambassador, those two combined means we are the first tribe in the state to have that designation together.”
The National Weather Service’s current online catalogue of Weather-Ready Nation Ambassadors lists the Cocopah Indian Tribe as the only tribe in Arizona with the designation.
In total, there are 20 sites in Arizona that are Storm-Ready. The NWS Storm-Ready Community map shows that out of those twenty, two are Indian Nations, the Cocopah Indian Tribe and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, which is a U.S. Indian Reservation.
In total, there are about 1,600 enrolled tribal members who live on and off the Cocopah Indian Reservation. The reservation spans over three areas in the east, west and north in Yuma County and is comprised of approximately 6,500 acres.
“The east can be in bad weather but the north might not be,” Fila noted. “What we did was I asked if they could build a dashboard that had the east, the west and the north reservation so that I could see real weather information on all the reservations at the same time. This is a prototype, and we are the first tribe in the country that the National Weather Service has built this for us.”
“We are very concerned about the change in weather,” Fila added. “We have elders on the reservation that we need to look out for when extreme heat comes. Any kind of wind event might result in a power outage, so we just want to be on top of whatever is going to be the change so that we can be ready to act to keep the community and visitors safe.”
According to Fila, feedback from the tribal community has been positive, with a female member even leaving a comment of thanks on the Cocopah Emergency Management Facebook page for the forecast because “her family has asthma and they need to know when that ozone is changing,” he said.
“When you hear that, I think that’s where it all comes together.”
Rosa Long, councilwoman for the Cocopah Indian Tribe, said The Cocopah Tribe is very honored and humbled that they were designated Weather-Ready and Storm-Ready.
“It lets us know we are doing our job as leadership to safeguard our community as a whole. We’ve had those instances where one reservation is facing an ordeal and the other ones were not, so to know we are able to foresee that and we are being proactive instead of reactive, that is one of the things that is going to be really crucial when safeguarding our community.”
The Cocopah emergency manager added that he also meets with “the 22 tribes in Arizona” to network.
“This actually could be a trend for tribal nations to possibly go in, to doing something similar with their tribe,” Long said. “Once they see that it’s working for one tribe, maybe that will follow on. I asked my employees and my members if they utilize this, do they like it, and they say they really enjoy having that access to that information before their kids go out to school or before they go out to work.”
For more information on the Cocopah Indian Tribe, visit www.cocopah.com.