The City of New Boston is now taking on the responsibility for opening the courthouse basement as a shelter during storms, officials said.
“We reached an agreement with the judge to let us handle it because we do have firefighters in the city 24/7,” said Wayne Dial, city administrator. “The fire department will be in charge of putting someone up there in case of a natural disaster to open it.”
Residents in and around New Boston have taken to social media to complain about the shelter not being opened in recent months.
“I spoke to the Bowie County Head of Emergency Management and was told that the courthouse is not a public shelter and never has been. There used to be volunteers but they don’t want to do it anymore. I volunteered myself to be a keyholder and gave my phone number. Was supposed to be called the following Monday but I didn’t receive that call,” said Amanda Sipes on an April 15 Facebook post.
And a resident came into the Tribune recently saying that he had driven to the courthouse when the tornado sirens were activated.
Lance Hall, Bowie County Emergency Management, wouldn’t go on the record other than to say the basement hadn’t been opened because of a lack of ADA compliance.
The courthouse basement was designed to transport prisoners to and from the courthouse for court appearances, but had previously been used as a shelter for many years.
Dial said the basement isn’t ADA compliant but it is the only option residents have outside of building a private shelter in their yards.
“That basement was not designed to be a storm shelter, but it’s the best we’ve got. What do we do? Just shut it down? No, that’s not a viable solution. Outside of that is building a new one like DeKalb did. But it took them getting directly hit by a tornado to even get that one built. Where’s the money going to come from to build one if that’s the solution? I don’t know. There’s a lot of questions we don’t have an answer for right now. So we’ll just have to do the best we can until we can come up with a viable solution. “Let’s face it, the city cannot meet every need of every citizen on any given day or time, but we’re going to do the best we can with what we’ve got … The courthouse was not rated for an F-5 tornado, but it is all we’ve got here and we’re going to try to utilize that the best we can.”
Dial said he will be working with the police and fire chiefs as well as other city officials to create a standard operating procedure for opening the shelter.
“It’s an imperfect system right now. We’re still working out the bugs on it. This was something that came up just within the last few weeks so we’re still working out an SOP,” he said.
Dial added that part of the SOP will be to equip all firetrucks and police vehicles with a key to open the basement and what types of storms will qualify for opening.
“We don’t know yet until we get the SOP together. I don’t know what they did in the past … I’m still trying to work out what the standard procedure will be,” he said. “The (fire) chief and I talked a great deal about it and we did a tour of the facility there.”
The main issue the city foresees is that the need might outweigh the available resources.
“We’ve got a town of about 4,600 people and we can put a couple hundred in there maybe and that’s if everybody’s standing shoulder to shoulder,” said Dial. “Whoever wants to take shelter in there they can, all that will fit in there. If it’s a disaster, we’re not going to cut it off and say we’re at capacity. If you can squeeze in there, squeeze in there. We don’t have chairs down there or anything like that. And if someone is in an ADA situation, there’s no place for them to go down there and sit, there’s no place for them to go down there and be comfortable. It’s for the short-term.”
