Huntingdon County EMA Weathering The Storm
By: Aaron Cheslock
Updated: October 29, 2012
Their two biggest concerns are power outages and flooding, and the Huntingdon County Emergency Management Agency has been working all day to keep tabs on both. One big help was County Commissioners issuing this Declaration of Disaster.
"A Declaration of Disaster is another tool in our tool box which gives us the power to get more resources more quickly and take additional actions to help those communities respond in recovery to those disasters."
Adam Miller is the Director of Emergency Management in Huntingdon County, when it comes to deciding which problems are the priority, he's makes the call.
"We're concerned for the parts of the community that have no prepared themselves because this is going to be an extensive storm, wide-ranging and it has the potential to really break records here. And we're very concerned about it."
Miller's biggest concern early in the day was power outages, as the night moves on, water levels move up. Which makes his team shift their sights to flooding problems.
"We're gaining the water pretty quickly, streams are going up and they're going to continue to go up... We monitor all the local stream gauges as well as USGS sites, and information from our responders out there who are providing us rain gauges as we go."
We ask Miller how bad he thinks it'll get by this time Tuesday. He says with this storm, nothing is predictable.
"We're going to continue to monitor it, were at the mercy of nature, so whatever it throws at us we're going to have to deal with."
Miller adds that he'll keep sending out, Incident Summaries. They show the area's flood and rain gauge levels. The latest update we've received shows that the Little Juniata, the Juniata River in Huntingdon, and Aughwick Creek in Shirleysburg have all started to flood. We'll keep sifting through these reports, and bringing you the latest.


