By Tiffany S. Jones
News & Record (Greensboro, NC)
Copyright 2006 News & Record (Greensboro, NC)
All Rights Reserved
When emergency situations arise in Sedalia, neighbors can now help themselves and each other until professional help arrives.
Twenty-one of the town’s residents have become the first group to participate in seven training classes on how to respond in disasters.
“It’s very beneficial,” Mayor Howard Morgan said during the recent council meeting. “It teaches everything from how to deal with a fire to first aid and everything that a small town would need to deal with an emergency situation.”
The course was completed last night. Its “graduates” are now a part of the Sedalia Community Emergency Response Team. In of an emergency, team members could be called upon as first responders.
Also at the Sedalia meeting, Duane Bryant, an alternate member of the Planning Board, told the council that the Planning Board had a visit from David Stencil, a senior planner of the N.C. Division of Community Assistance, to talk about the board’s plan for a comprehensive land-use plan.
“This is a galvanizing plan that we can make together and we can work and pull together as a team and community,” Bryant said Friday.
The board has done research and found that it will be at least nine months before the proper agency in Guilford County can begin helping with the plan and 10 months before Stencil and the people in his office can help.
“Then the process will still take about 10 to 12 months,” Bryant said, “so the entire process will take about 18 to 22 months.”
The board might be able to come up with a plan more quickly, but Stencil advised them not to do so.
“If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right,” Bryant said. “Change is inevitable, and change without a plan is chaos,” he added.