Iron County Sheriff wants mobile command post

By ZACHARY MARANO

zmarano@yourdailyglobe.com

Hurley — The Iron County Sheriff Department is interested in purchasing an incident command trailer to act as a mobile command post during prolonging incidents, Sheriff Paul Samardich said to the Iron County Law Enforcement Committee at their meeting on Monday.

“Quite often, our search and rescue functions are utilized in the summertime where heat would be an issue for changing people in and out,” Samardich said to the Daily Globe. “We had several incidents in the last few years where something like this could have been utilized — a major flooding in Saxon Harbor, some missing person cases — where the search and rescue operations have extended into several days and where we had to look to commandeer an area to put up a command post.”

Samardich said that cold weather can also pose a challenge when they have to stay in the field for extended periods of time. He said there was a homicide case that occurred in Mercer a couple of years ago where the sheriff department had to work in 20 below zero weather. He said they had to rotate in and out of cars to warm up and that a heated trailer would have been useful in that situation.

Samardich and Chief Deputy Jason Geach have been working with Darrell Petrusha of Iron County Emergency Management in finding a custom-built trailer that will suit their needs. Petrusha said they are interested in a mobile command post from Missouri Great Dane. The trailer is 16 feet long and has seven feet of headroom inside and has an onboard generator for air conditioning, heating and lighting.

Petrusha said the trailer would cost taxpayers $89,497. This cost may increase or decrease depending on the sheriff department’s specifications.

Petrusha said if the finance committee approves the purchase of the trailer, they would make some changes to accommodate for the sheriff department. For example, he said that the air conditioning unit on the roof of the trailer might not clear the department’s 10-foot garage door. Petrusha said he emailed the dealership about mounting the air conditioning on front of the trailer or flat on the top.

Samardich said that one of the primary functions of such a trailer would be communications, including directing people to a certain location, instructing them how to search and moving groups of people from one location to another. He said that in emergencies, the sheriff’s department works with multiple agencies and a command post would ease the burden of directing operations.

If approved, Petrusha said he would outfit the trailer with radios. Instead of cramming everything into one radio, he said there would be separate radios for law enforcement, local government, the Iron County-wide radio system and the Wisconsin Interoperable System for Communications, or WISCOM. Petrusha said that during an incident, two or three people could sit in the command post operating the radios.

“I wish we had something like this back when I worked there,” Petrusha said. “You can’t sit in your car all night long and you can’t work off the trunk of your car when you have incidents. I think it’s an asset to the county all around.”

A motion to bring this item before the finance committee was approved. The finance committee will consider the purchase at its next meeting on Wednesday at noon at the courthouse.