Morton County Emergency Management defended its ability to communicate in an emergency despite a critical evaluation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The evaluation was based on an exercise held July 26.

Morton Emergency Manager Tammy Lapp-Harris was joined by N.D. Association of Counties-League of Cities consultants Joel Lostberg and J.P. Moszer in explaining the evaluation and resulting Associated Press story putting Mandan among the lowest scores in 75 areas across the country surveyed by Homeland Security.

County Commissioner Matt Erhardt said he placed the issue on the agenda because questions had been raised by constituents he was unable to answer and that the news story was an embarrassment to the county.

Lapp-Harris responded that a number of unexpected factors led to the poor score, but despite that, the full-scale exercise was a success and changes have been made.

Lostberg added that the federal employees conducting the evaluation didn't understand the area and rural setting. He said he thought Lapp-Harris and Stark County Gary Kostelecky did very well in the exercise, which was based on a fictional chlorine spill north of Mandan on July 26. It had been preceded by a table-top exercise in March. About 100 emergency responders participated in the full-scale exercise.

"If there had been rural criteria in the evaluation, Mandan would have probably been at the top of the heap. The evaluators didn't understand some of the issues we face in North Dakota, such as the complication of line of sight and the distances between communities of up to a 100 miles or more," Lostberg said.

"The Mandan area, which has a population of 16,000, was compared to areas which have up to 185,000 people in one locality. There were 75 areas evaluated in 2006, and 48 were urban areas with large populations. They should have been evaluated apple to apple and orange to orange, but weren't," Lostberg said.

The exercise wasn't based on Morton's ability to communicate within its own boundaries, but rather a combining of emergency responders from Morton and Stark counties. Morton was asked to participate.

"The response to the 'chlorine leak' was with the idea that we couldn't rely on Bismarck and Burleigh responders so that we had to call another area. We chose Dickinson because it was about 100 miles away," Lapp-Harris said.

The exercise was expected to give officials a good idea of what similar responders statewide could expect, according to Lostberg.

That same day, State Radio, which would have been integral in responder communications, was down, according to Lapp-Harris, as was the Dickinson radio tower. Evaluators were critical when they found out that responders coming from Dickinson and Richardton could only talk to Mandan Fire Chief Steve Nardello when they were 20 miles out of Mandan.

Interoperable communications calls for responders to be in voice communications at all times, but North Dakota's long distances and uneven terrain make that difficult.

"In the feds' eyes, that just was not good enough," Lapp-Harris said.

Evaluations also were critical of the types of equipment, such as cache radios and gateway systems, which weren't available to responders. Moszer pointed out that such systems cost thousands of dollars, which North Dakota emergency response agencies can't afford.

One of the reasons for holding such exercises is to show federal evaluators such deficiencies in hopes of federal funds for proper equipment.

"One thing Tammy and Gary did, which the federal evaluators had never seen, was a PSAP (public safety answering point) patch. It allowed them to work around some of the communication problems," Moszer said.

During the course of the exercise, two actual emergencies did take place, Lapp-Harris recalled, a gas leak west of Mandan and a car accident on Sunset Drive.

"There wasn't even a hiccup in the process, and appropriate responses were made with no difficulties," Lapp-Harris said.

"The exercise did not fail; if you don't have exercises, you can't find shortfalls,"Moszer said. "We came up with an operation plan, tested it and found shortcomings. We're now mitigating those shortcomings. Some things can never be fixed, after all, North Dakota isn't New York, and that's what we're trying to get across to the feds."

Lapp-Harris suspected that, with all the detracting factors that they had no control over taken into account, the evaluation was likely to be bad. She adds that many of the problems have been fixed.

County commissioners agreed and indicated Emergency Management had accounted for any perceived problems.