The Eye On the Sky articles have been published for over a month now and I felt that it is time for you to know who is behind them.
Brookings County Emergency Management was reorganized in 2013 when I, Bob Hill, was appointed as the county emergency manager. I was previously the Brookings County planning, zoning and drainage director, a position that I held from 2003 to 2013. In 2013, with the addition of Emergency Management, my department became the County Development Office, and I received a deputy director, Richard Haugen, to assist in running the office. The final addition to the County Development Office was office technician, Rae Lynn Maher, the glue who keeps the office functioning.
I started my employment with Brookings County in 1999 as a part-time emergency management office assistant.
I was born and raised in Missouri, joined the U.S. Army at 17, and retired in Brookings in 1997. I was accepted into South Dakota State University in 1998 as a full-time student and was looking for a part-time job and was hired by Brookings County. I graduated in 2003 with an MS in geography and consider myself a hazards geographer.
I suppose that my military days factored in becoming both a geographer and an emergency manager. I was a combat engineer for two years, I filled a lot of sandbags during that time, and then my last 18 years were as a nuclear, biological and chemical specialist, which covered protection from weapons of mass destruction.
Haugen was born and raised in South Dakota and has worked with me since 2005. Richard’s day-to-day duties are to run the planning and zoning portion of the office and to be prepared to take over the Emergency Management duties when I am out of the office. Richard is a South Dakota emergency management-certified emergency manager.
Rae Lynn Maher, my office technician, has the difficult job of assisting both Richard and me. She is the person who greets you when entering our office in the Brookings City & County Government Center and is the secretary of the Brookings County Planning Commission.
She excelled when we had federal declarations for flooding in 2019 and the derecho in 2022, working with the whole county to get paperwork assembled. She also proofreads the Eye On the Sky articles and provides valuable advice when they are being prepared.
It wouldnt be proper not to mention a weather topic before I sign off.
A topic that I find disturbing is people who leave someone in a vehicle and go into a store to pick something up. I have read many articles where someone says “‘But I left the car air conditioning running for them,’ or ‘I was only going to be in there for a minute.’
Children, adults, and pets should never be left in a car, no matter the time of year. I added adults because I have caught myself telling my wife that I will just wait in the car for you while you are shopping. An hour later when she came out, I was soaking wet with sweat and came close to having heat exhaustion. The temps were in the 70s, but as the following information states it can be dangerous.
Vehicular heatstroke has occured when outside temperatures are below 70 degrees sunlight can cause the inside of a car to heat up quickly. Even if you leave the air conditioning on and the engine running what could happen if it shuts off suddenly? Or a child decides to play driving and shifts the vehicle into gear?
The atmosphere and the windows of a car are relatively transparent to the suns shortwave radiation and are warmed little. This shortwave energy, however, does heat objects it strikes. For example, a dark dashboard or seat can easily reach temperatures in the range of 180 to more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
These objects (e.g., dashboard, steering wheel, childseat) heat the adjacent air by conduction and convection and also give off longwave radiation, which is very efficient at warming the air trapped inside a vehicle.
Each year dozens of children and pets die from being left in unattended vehicles across the country. Dr. Catherine McLaren, et al., published an article in Pediatrics in 2005 titled Heat Stress From Enclosed Vehicles: Moderate Ambient Temperatures Cause Significant Temperature Rise in Enclosed Vehicles, which showed evidence that at relatively cool outside temperatures, the temperature inside a vehicle can rise significantly, with the majority of the temperature rise occurring within the first 15 to 30 minutes. In addition, they found that leaving windows cracked does not significantly slow the heating process or decrease the maximum temperature measured inside the vehicle. To prevent serious heat-related illness or death, children should never be left unattended in a vehicle. Materials were provided by the NWS/NOAA.
Stay cool this summer and keep an eye on the sky.
Bob the EM.
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