Greenwood schools residents on what to expect with eclipse

GREENWOOD — The Greenwood Chamber of Commerce held a meeting Wednesday to prepare business owners and residents for the expected tourist spike from the solar eclipse Monday and to explain the science behind the event.

About 50 residents of the city attended the meeting, according to Chamber of Commerce records.

“Fifty percent increase of the population is what we’ve always been told — 1.5 million. That means 50% more heart attacks, 50% more strokes, 50% more car wrecks,” said Kendall Beam, director of emergency management for Sebastian County.

Roberta Parks, a professor at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith and an astronomy enthusiast, said the moment of totality will happen at 1:51 p.m. and last for two minutes. She said the eclipse will cause colors to dull and become more silvery-blue. Shadows will be distorted, and animals and plants will behave as if it were night, she said.

Partial coverage and first contact will begin at 12:31 p.m., and Parks advised not looking directly at the sun without glasses, except for the moment of totality.

“The reason why we really stress having the solar glasses is that you wouldn’t go outside right now to stare at the sun,” Parks said. “Your eyes wouldn’t let you. Your instincts would make you look away because it would physically hurt our eyes to look at the sun. But during a partial eclipse, when the sun is partially covered up, you could stare at the sun because your instincts wouldn’t make you look away, but you would damage your eyes, not just from the visible light, but from the ultraviolet light.”

Beam said the emergency management team has been preparing for the eclipse for more than a year. During the past six months, they have attended Zoom meetings with other emergency management teams in the city’s Federal Emergency Management Agency region about three times per week. These meetings included officials from Texas and Oklahoma as well as Arkansas.

“If you don’t prepare, then things can go bad,” Beam said.

According to Beam and Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Bob Purvis, the city is expecting the temporarily increased population to strain emergency resources including police, ambulances and firefighters. Beam said traffic accidents are to be expected as a result of the influx of people because of out-of-towners unaccustomed to using two-lane highways and distracted drivers looking at the sky during the eclipse.

Meeting attendees, including Greenwood residents Paul Van Love and Jeris Larson said they were concerned about the increased traffic. Other major concerns from the meeting were slowed cellphone service and inconveniences from the sudden boom in population.

Terry Adams and Andrea Rogers with Diversified Computer Resources attended the meeting and said they are expecting issues with cellular service and broadband usage.

“Places where people congregate — everyone’s gonna have a phone, everyone’s gonna want internet access, especially during this, so if they have access to the Wi-Fi, it’s gonna drain the resources,” said Adams, a senior executive with the local business.

Adams said the issue comes from networks that are accustomed to smaller user bases suddenly having a significantly larger demand. However, Beam said during the meeting this is not something he anticipates as a problem.

“We’ve got good cellphone coverage in this area,” Beam said. “I don’t expect cellphone coverage to go down or anything like that.”

Beam said the city is preparing to divide its emergency resources to allow for shorter response times, but he told meeting attendees to be aware that help may be slower to arrive.

“All our service teams are going to be cut in half,” he said. “We’re going to split our search team — every county is going to split their search team in two — so we can send one to other counties if they need it.”

The city is basing its response on the 2017 eclipse and reports from cities in the path of totality from that event, according to Purvis.

Another potential issue Beam said may present itself is cloud coverage. At the time of the meeting, the forecast showed a 50% chance of clear skies or overcast and the likelihood of overcast skies was higher in Texas and Oklahoma. Beam said if those states ended up having cloudy skies in the path of totality, it is likely people will leave those areas and come to Arkansas — meaning even more people in Greenwood.

“The problem is we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Beam said. “We don’t know if it’s going to be like a Y2K event where everything is a normal day — we hope so — or if it’s maybe going to be 1.6 million visitors.”

Speakers at the meeting did not give specific advice to residents beyond awareness of the increased population and the risk it poses. During Monday’s City Council meeting, Mayor Doug Kinslow advised parents to keep an eye on their children and be aware of outsiders coming into the town.