Two sessions of the Johnson County Academy have already flown by, and I’m learning so much about the County governance, financing, and more.

There is a lot of information shared through slides, videos, and tours that just doesn’t translate well to an email with any level of excitement, though, 🙂 so I probably won’t do any straight recaps, BUT I did have a major takeaway during the first week:

Johnson County IS vulnerable to disasters. Period.

Look how close the Douglas/Leavenworth tornado came to JoCo last year.

We can not rely solely on the emergency sirens. Nevermind that many of us (me, but not my sister in Olathe 🙂 ) just ignore them now anyway because we’ve been lulled into a false sense of security… But the sirens are only one of many tools you should be using to alert you to disaster.

Most importantly, we should all sign up for #NotifyJoCo. Go to NotifyJoCo.org, click Register Now in the top right-hand corner, and follow the directions to input your JoCo locations like home, school, work (it wouldn’t take my KCMO work address 🙁 ) and your notification preferences.

Here are the notifications I subscribed to, knowing that if it gets to be too much, I can always unsubscribe from the least relevant:

This is a different type of safety caution, but remember this, too: What keeps our Emergency Manager up at night is “our reliance on technology.” There is a whole team within the County focused on Cyberthreat that includes the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and more. So, secure your devices, passwords, and personal information, and minimize your risk.

Next week we’ll be hearing from Mental Health and Corrections!

Stay tuned!