McKenzie Burton is the new Emergency Management Coordinator for Hardin County.
Burton worked in the emergency room at the hospital in Iowa Falls, before taking a job as a police dispatcher, and also helping out with the Iowa Falls Fire Department.
Burton tells RadioOnTheGo News that she has already been working on a major project.
“We have RAGBRAI coming to Iowa Falls as an overnight town on July 23rd. So as an emergency management, I was in charge of finding like shelter locations for the potentially 30,000 people that are coming to Iowa Falls and to making sure in the event of severe weather, everyone has a shelter to go to.”
Burton says one of her duties as the EMC for the county is to educate the public on areas such as emergency alert notifications.
“So we have Alert Iowa and if you go to the Hardin County website, there’ll be an emergency management tab and you can sign up on there too. And you can sign up to receive those alerts and they’re not only for weather. They’re also like a few months ago, we sent out one for like a boil advisory Radcliffe, I think it was. just, you know, community things too. Or if we had like a hazmat incident and we would be able to notify people to like shelter in place or that they need to evacuate like that too and come right to your phone or email or both.”
Burton was the assistant EMC in Hardin County to Thomas Craighton, who resigned last month.
