During a training drill Thursday, people could be heard speaking at a normal volume on the second floor of the Durango Public Library.
Normally a shushing zone with communication primarily done by whispering, the Southwest Collections area and conference rooms became the temporary quarters of the city manager, city clerk and city attorney.
It’s an area of the second floor that is less frequented by the reading public, but it could be the future home of city staff in a real disaster.
Thursday’s exercise was meant to test Durango’s continuity-in-government plans.
City Hall was closed until 1 p.m. Thursday because of a make-believe fire, but the cause of the fire was not explained in the drill.
To staff members, it did not matter whether the fire was the result of an accident or something more malicious.
They were focused on how well they could function if headquarters were shut down. The scenario was not about trying to suppress anarchy on city streets or respond to a security threat.
So Mayor Dick White and Mayor Pro-Tem Sweetie Marbury did not need to be sent to safe and secure locations.
“This is about operations. In a real event, (elected officials) would be apprised of the situation and be a public face,” said Sherri Dugdale, the city’s public information officer.
For training purposes, “it’s complicated enough with staff,” Dugdale said.
The point also was not to test personnel but to assess whether contingency plans would work or not.
The exercise sparked a discussion about whether it was wise to have the offices of the top three executives – the city manager, the finance director and city clerk – in the same building, Dugdale said.
To help preserve continuity of government, officials now are discussing whether to move one of the executive offices elsewhere or extend the line of succession a bit further to a fourth or fifth executive, Dugdale said.
For the exercise, Julie Brown, the city’s finance director, was directed to the city operations center in Bodo Industrial Park.
“You can’t put the president and the vice president on the same plane together,” Dugdale explained. “It’s just like that.”
jhaug@durangoherald.com
