 The Durham County Manager's Office. This afternoon, we are holding this press conference to bring our residents and those who are interested in what's happening in the Durham community up to speed on what we're doing to prepare for the campaign implement whether, if you could, part of the influence to impact our area. Our main speaker today is our Emergency Management Director of Fire Marshall, Jim Rose. Also a part of those who are featured today and available in support of Jim Rose are our Deputy Chief Manager, Bill Ferguson, Interim Fire Chief, Chris Iuzzi, Deputy Police Chief, Anthony Marsh, also County Manager, Mindell Davis, Sheriff Michael Andrews, Interim Emergency Medical Services Director, as well as representatives from Durham Public Schools. At this time, I will turn it over to Jim Rose, our Emergency Manager Director and Fire Marshall. Thank you, Dawn. Again, my name is Jim Rose. I am the City and County Emergency Management Director for Durham and Durham County. I'd like to give everyone just a quick update on what we're at without preparedness activities and also our coordination efforts with both government entities and also paid-pays and private sector organizations. Thank you all for being here and helping us share our community's message and our preparedness efforts. We really appreciate that and the efforts to get this done. Earlier today, the City and County signed a Declaration of Emergency specifically for each entity. Chair Jacobs signed the County's Declaration and Mayor Schill signed the Seals Declaration of Emergency. Just to let you know on the County side, the Declaration of Emergency kind of sets us up in our first step for one and two different emergency operations claim or how we go about an emergency response for disasters. It also supports requests to the state and to the federal government for resource assistance. In addition, it also relaxes regulatory requirements for public and care entities so that you can take care of your people. If there's a restaurant, if there's a licensed facility, if there's a homeless shelter, it kind of relaxes their requirements so they can take care of their people. So the Declaration does that. In addition, it kind of sets us up to receive federal disaster recovery assistance. So the funds that we spend on personnel, equipment, or supplies can be recruited and the Declaration of Emergency is the first piece of that as well. Our coordination efforts have been going months of Sunday. We follow a time delay in the schedule, 120 hours out of the notice event, and we follow that down to zero hours when the hazard arrives. We have been conducting conference calls with our stakeholders in both company organizations with the public sector, schools, courts, to make sure that we're responding as we need to be, that we have a coordinated and a singular response and we're speaking with one of us. Our coordination calls have been with our shelter teams. It has been with our joint information team, state emergency management, and the National Brethren Service, and that has included all of our public safety agencies, public health social services, schools, courts, public works, public information, transportation, communication, utilities, and other codes. So we are really trying to foster a whole community approach to this disaster coming upon us. We've identified flood prone locations, locations that have flooded in the past that we've had to get people out of apartments or homes, where their cars have been damaged or we've had to close roads. We've implemented, we've actually uploaded that, those polygons or shape bonds into our regular notification system, and starting tomorrow and Thursday we'll be seeing those messages out to those areas so people know that they need to leave and to make sure their vehicles are clear so they're not impacted. By this 10 to 12 inches of rain that we predicted to receive. We've identified the following evacuation shelters. The pre-event, Bahamut, Ruiton will open at 12 o'clock tomorrow and this is a change we already discussed earlier. Hillside will open Wednesday at 6 p.m. So Bahamut, Ruiton for pre-arrival and Hillside for pre-arrival. Bahamut at 12 o'clock tomorrow. Hillside will open tomorrow at 6 p.m. If you come to the shelter, this is mainly for folks that you don't feel safe in a home. Maybe a trailer, maybe it's a rough construction, maybe you fled before and you know that it's going to be an issue. So these shelters are really just to get folks out of the hazard and give them a safe place to stay while the hazard of the hurricane that kind of goes over us. If you go to one of these shelters, bring a sleeping bag, bring snacks, no coolers, no alcohol, no liquid drugs, bring vaccination records for your pets, bring a bacteria, bring a leash. Bring your caregiver for individuals who might have access or functional needs. Those are very simple things that we're asking if you come to our shelters right now. We'll be giving more information shortly about that. We want to remind folks, please do not call 911 for general information. They are going to be inundated with emergency calls. So please, if you want to call for information, if it's about the utility, call the utility outage number. Duke Energy is 1-800-POWER-ON. Piedmont is 1-800-449-2667 or 1-800-222-3107. For any other questions, we can ask you to call the Durham One Call Center at 560-1200 or the County's Health Line at 560-HELP. They'll have the same information. They'll be able to provide that information to you if they can't. They'll contact us at the Emergency Operations Center and we'll get an answer out. It's important for you folks to know too that once the WINS approach and achieve 40 miles an hour of sustained or 58 miles an hour of gusts or greater, our emergency responders may not be responding. When we call that our service level criteria, that's a level three criteria, and that is designed not to put them in harm's way. So understand that. When we say pre-deploy to a shelter, take care of these activities early. We're sincere about that because we don't want our responders in harm's way. So lastly, maybe the most important thing that I can share with you right now, please be accountable for your own safety. The safety of your family, the safety of your relatives, the safety of your pets. Please don't depend on us for your safety. We will come running, but it's really up to you to be accountable for your own safety. So please, please, please understand this with responders, depending on how many trees are down the roadways and the utility down. If they're flooded, may not be able to get out within hours, potentially even days, depending on how bad it is. So be responsible for your own safety. We like to say you must do 72. That means be prepared to survive on your own without any assistance for 72 hours. Kind of say, can't be at home without a campfire inside. Be able to do that. So have non-perishful food and water with you for your family and your pets. Have a way to receive emergency messages when the power's off. Have a plan on where to shelter inside of your home. Typically a basement or first floor inside a room. You can say put as many rooms or walls between you and the outside as possible. Inside bathrooms are regular location. Please don't forget to check on your friends and your neighbors and the elderly before and after the hurricane. Reach out, give them a call, pay them a visit before the hazard arrives, and check on them after those. If you need more information, please go to Alert Durham for preparedness information. You can sign up for automatic emergency messages. That is www.alertdurham.com. Scroll down and get the sign up. And you can receive all of the automated natural weather service alerts. You can receive updates to emergency operations center. And you can also receive recovery information once the storm has passed on what to do. We've also got a lot of information that there's an access or functioning need registry. You can register there. You can also learn a lot about more preparedness and recovery information. With that, that is my discussion with you. I appreciate you coming out. Any questions? I'm Beverly Thompson with the City of Durham. And these men aren't up here just for support, but they're here to answer any questions that you might have regarding your preparations for hurricane storms. We do have people here from the county, the city, as well as Durham public schools. So with that, we'll open it up to questions and if you would introduce yourself and save your question. Thank you. I'm Ben Leonard with the ninth three journal. Just was wondering about the, I've seen some flyers going around do the homeless about just warning them about the weather conditions. What are the things is the city and or county doing in order to protect the homeless? Thank you for that question. In addition to the shelters at campus, those sides that will be open up and the HEMA, as has been mentioned, urban ministries of Durham is adding extra cops so that they can accommodate as many additional folks as possible. And we have been outreach to the other outreach teams through housing for new hope and open table ministries to make sure that folks know that urban ministries have additional heads available and about the emergency shelters that are also there. I think on top of their additional capacity, which is about 180, they're adding 20 to 30 additional cops. Hey, Sarah, well, it's a D week. Could you all speak about your expectations in terms of flooding, whether there are concerns around flooding as a result of drainage, river flooding, what do you expect in the next year? I think we can expect both. While we're hearing if it holds true with the forecast or the next, when this thing starts Thursday night, Friday morning, the next two or three days, 10 to 12 inches of rain. So I think we can expect both, depending on if we get a hot pocket, we can send you flash flooding. But we can definitely expect river rain flooding and the traditional flooding around the grand interiors that cause problems in the Tassie to do the debris back up. Or once the waters come up, they find a degree to bring that back down with them and they can clog its pockets. So we expect in the traditional areas that we've seen in the past. Dawn and I are with some again. You'd mentioned earlier that the low river reservoir could be strained or additionally, can you talk more about that? Hi, I'm Bo Ferguson, Deputy Manager of the City of Durham. We don't have concerns about reservoirs. We are releasing water now from the reservoirs to ensure that they can handle additional water. In addition to having abundance of caution, we'll have staff at both facilities throughout the event monitoring both facilities. They're designed to be able to handle unfortunately these sort of extreme conditions. We expect that they will be able to handle these conditions and if for any reason we experience any trouble facilities will work with emergency management to push that information out. But right now, we do not anticipate any problems with those two reservoirs. Hi, Amy Blalock, Durham Television Network. We're getting a question here. We're streaming live on Facebook and one of our viewers would like to know, will Durham City water flow even if the power is out? So Deputy City Manager, could you address that for our viewer? Yes, again, Bo Ferguson, Deputy City Manager for Operations. The Durham City water system, the water utility that serves Durham and Durham County is extremely resilient. It's designed to operate in these conditions. All of our water treatment plants, all of the booster facilities that provide water into the water system have active power, have multiple connections to the power grid and they're designed to be operational. So if water is coming out of your tap during this event, which it should be, the water is safe. The only thing that might help water supplies and water being great, which can happen outside of extreme weather events, certainly can happen in extreme weather events, but we have no reason to think that this event will have any abnormal effect on water supply. Certainly if extreme conditions do warrant the application for action out, we would share that, but under normal circumstances a hurricane, heavy rain, event like this, will not affect the water supply in any way. Is there anyone that's going to round up all the line bikes on the streets or worry about projectiles? I see our Director of Transportation, Terry Bellamy, who's available and he can address that. Good afternoon, Terry Bellamy, Director County, Texas City of Durham. We've notified line bike and span to remove the bicycles from the right of way during this event, and that's common practice when you have a hurricane outland. It's to move and retrieve. Our goal is to try to get 100 percent. That's what we're going to do with the bikes. What's the, what are the plans for responding to power outages, particularly prolonged winds? Probably a deep energy question, but can you talk a little bit about the coordination with our utilities? Sure, I mean power is a very difficult question to answer simply because depends on what infrastructure is damaged and how long that's going to be on. Part of that is that cultural preparedness and being prepared for 72 hours. If anyone around here experienced Fran in 1996, power was out for up to two weeks. So part of that is camping at home and understanding how to survive without our air conditioner and things like that. We can make it for the most part, but you know, sort of sense of populations can. But we work with the utility wanting to identify the film, our areas of need, our shelter locations, hospitals and the shelter operations center, public service facilities and things like that. And then it's really kind of for them. We share the need, but based on utility, they'll have to have transmission lines before they can serve us times. And unfortunately that takes some time. You do have the superintendent of Durham Public Schools here and I would ask you if you'd like to make a statement for sharing the information. Mariboya Chief Operating Officer Durham Public Schools. Again, we appreciate the cooperation amongst the entities within the city and county. We are working to open Hillside. We have three other high schools as secondary possible shelters. We have announced that Durham Public Schools schedule will be a normal schedule tomorrow. Extracurricular activities tomorrow evening, a three hour early release Thursday and no extracurricular activities from Thursday afternoon through Sunday. Once again, Jim Rose, the city and county emergency management director. Let's just give a few closing remarks. Want to let our community know that this has been a tremendous effort and a team response with the city and county. They've been incredibly proactive, very supportive of our emergency planning needs. Well before the incident, especially as we go into our crisis noted emergency operations center. A message I would like to make sure we know the folks in addition to self preparedness, family preparedness and pet preparedness. Make sure when these wins comes that there's nothing around you at all, patio or deck that can become a projectile. And these things can range from trampolines, patio from church to grills to trash pickup boxes. I think that recycling bins, anything like that. Think about what's around your house that could become a projectile because it probably will. While you're out there, look around your neighborhood. And if you've got a neighbor that hasn't done that, get in the front of the door and ask them to do that because he's right there very well. So please make sure that things are really buttoned up, tightened up and ready to go with this with this. Last thing I want to say is, you know, Administrative Prop along with FEMA is a North Carolina Navy. And he is really preaching on this culture of preparedness. And that's not just for government. It is for individuals. So please take our warnings seriously. Survive on your own. Make sure you've got this stuff taken care of so you don't have to reach out for help. We'd rather be you be self sufficient and happy home than have to visit us more in our shelter locations. Thank you all so much for coming. We'll be pushing out information to our alert dorm as well as we invite you to keep a check on our websites, the city and the county websites for information. Thank you all for