Partnership helps Navajo
prepare for emergencies

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

GALLUP — It’s difficult to prepare for a disaster when you’ve been taught that you’re not even supposed to talk about such an eventuality.

But the Navajo Nation Department of Emergency Management and Work Force Development are teaming together to hire members of the community and train them to deal — on a community level — with potential disaster situations such as this past winter’s snow and mud emergencies.

Nathaniel Begay of Tuba City and Dominic Tabaha of Window Rock are two young Navajo attending this week’s training at The Inn of Gallup.

“Where we come from, we don’t talk about disaster,” Begay said. “Our elders say we’re not supposed to talk about it. It’s like bringing bad on yourself.”

At the same time, both young men say they live in a sovereign nation where chapters are fairly rural and independent. Some are separated by great distances from the nearest police and emergency services, so in the event the unspeakable happens, somebody has to know what to do until specially trained emergency responders arrive on the scene.

Part of that training is taking charge, organizing community resources available, knowing who to call when the situation can’t be handled on the local level and when.

“We’re trying to move the Navajo Nation in a direction where they can be able to manage their own situations,” from hazardous materials accident to bioterrorism, Jimson Joe, executive director of Emergency Management, said Wednesday.

“This year we had a big snowstorm, and during our emergency response to the big snow and huge mud problem that we had on Navajo in January-February, we responded with chapters to take care of their people.

“Through the actual activities of responding to needs of our community members, we found that a national response method and procedure was actually used in some of the chapters that had declared an emergency. We were able to deliver food, water and supplies using local community members and demonstrating use of the National Incident Management System.”

Participants at the training session already have received and tested out on several levels of emergency preparedness training. Now, they’re putting it all together so they can help their communities understand the importance of having teams and working together to identify vulnerabilities, risks, and how to protect their populations.

Those participating in the training were hired by Work Force Development to do tasks at chapters and Emergency Management stepped in to provide training. Joe said skills they learn also could be beneficial in helping them find careers in public safety, firefighting or emergency medical services.

“We want to help them to understand that there are other educational skills they need to develop on their own that come along with this training ... basic skills of writing proposals to help them solicit funds to continue to develop where they need to or specialize in certain areas of response skills,” Jim said.

According to Begay, training is bringing them up to date. “It’s mixing in what Joe does. He’s mixing in the conventional CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) training and first-responder training with our tradition. It’s like preparing us on how to mix the two to apply it where we’re from.”

Though you don’t talk about disasters, he said, “we all know that you have to get up to date on what’s going on. It’s teaching us all the information that we need to know and how to apply it — the basics of first-responding to different types of disasters.”

Tabaha, who works at St. Michaels Chapter, said, “It’s going to come in handy if something happens. We’ll know how to do it and won’t be all spaced out, just standing there, saying, ‘Oh, what to do?’ We can just get on it.”

“It’s helping us organize what we already know on a broader, wider scale,” said Begay, a firefighter and member of the Hotshots. “I think it’s needed. Especially us being our own nation, we’ve kind of got to take care of ourselves.”