Local emergency services will have to manage any issues caused by the anticipated influx of visitors to Garland County for the April 8 total solar eclipse without any additional funding, forcing first responders to change their plans for the celestial event.
Garland County Department of Emergency Management Director Bo Robertson said when plans were initially being made, there was the hope that Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders would preemptively issue a disaster declaration to make additional funding available.
"The state of Arkansas did not support the local jurisdictions with resource requests, and we had requested several resources all the way from ambulances to fire boats for Lake Ouachita and Lake Hamilton," he said.
"So really, without those requests coming in, we can only work with what we have every single day. So all of our volunteer fire departments, our sheriff's office, they have the same amount of resources for this eclipse that they did before the eclipse," he said.
While Garland County DEM has some resources, such as a shower trailer and an all-terrain vehicle, that have been assigned to volunteer fire departments, additional funding would have also provided options for more staging areas for emergency personnel.
"Going back to the initial request for resources that I made to the state of Arkansas on Nov. 8, we had numerous ambulances, multiple fire boats, first responders with emergency medical response capabilities," Robertson said.
"There was going to be a kind of a large footprint of resources and the personnel to manage those resources on a 24-hour basis. We were going to have staging areas in numerous places, including an area of a campground where someone had offered to house these first responders. So whenever the state did not come through with these requests, a lot of that just moved aside because we didn't have it to manage."
The DEM office on Mid-America Boulevard will serve as a staging area as will some of the county's schools, Robertson said.
"We're going to have smaller staging areas at a couple of schools on the north side like Jessieville," he said. "Some of the Buckville, Jessieville fire departments and LifeNet will be staged there. Jessieville has also offered up their fuel for any of the first responders that need it, and I thank them a lot for doing that."
The Lake Hamilton School District is also offering fuel for LifeNet, the sheriff's office, and first responders in that area, he said.
"That staging area has moved from the school really to 70 West Fire (Protection District) because ... without the additional resources, we don't need the larger footprint to put things there. So the lack of state assistance has really impacted how we respond and how we plan for this, and that's unfortunate."
Robertson said his biggest concern is ensuring emergency personnel can respond to incidents promptly and that victims can be transported to local hospitals.
"I'm actually kind of hoping for some clouds because if we get what the state said that we could have, ... it could be difficult to respond to calls," he said.
"If you look at the gridlock on some of the highways, and you think, 'I still need to get an ambulance to a patient that may be having a heart attack,' we may be able to get to that patient depending on where those resources are staged at, but getting that patient to a hospital can be a whole other nightmare," he said.
"And that's one of my biggest concerns."
There is also a concern about cellular networks failing during the eclipse, Robertson said.
"A lot of the cell companies -- we'll just use AT&T as an example -- let's say they're offering on a normal day-to-day basis 70% of their capacity," he said. "I think they're going to try to bump that up to about 90% capacity at some of these (towers)," he said.
"But if we get the number of people that they say we could have... everyone's going to want to be live streaming, taking pictures, taking video on the phone, FaceTiming with whomever," he said.
"And there is a real possibility all of that activity could kind of crash the cell system here, at least temporarily. There's just so many people that it may not be able to handle that, and that's the worst-case scenario."