Ill. Safety Officials Discuss `Grid System`

Dec. 19--EFFINGHAM -- Public safety professionals have become increasingly concerned about the well-being of people who use the back-country trails in Effingham County and elsewhere. A pair of Effingham city employees say they have a plan to make the trails safer.

The National Grid System was established several years ago to create a standardized mapping system in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Michelle Wilkens, a civil engineering technician with the city, said the system would provide a way to map areas without using landmarks such as buildings or signs.

"It would help emergency personnel navigate rural or unmarked locations," Wilkens said. "The big benefit is to put everybody on the same page. It's going to help dispatchers tell emergency respondershow to locate someone.

"It can also help people locate themselves," she added.

Wilkens said the program would be easy to implement locally because the overall program is already in place. Street names and addresses, she said, would remain as they are. It could be put in place in as few as six months, once the county's GIS and 911 programs are on board, according to Wilkens.

Effingham Fire Chief Joe Holomy said first responders sometimes struggle to find trail users needing assistance because the current grid only pinpoints a location to within a half-square mile -- or 320 acres. The new system, he said, would enable locations to be pinpointed within 20 or 30 yards, and could be accessed from the mobile phone of a trail user.

"In the event someone needs assistance, they would be able to tell us more or less exactly where they are at," Holomy said.

Emergency Telephone System Board Chairman Nick Althoff said the push toward adopting the grid system is driven by concerns over how to reach people in an emergency situation on the TREC trail system west of Effingham. But Althoff added that the county will likely be compelled to adopt it at some point.

"If we don't adopt something like this and we have a major emergency, federal agencies might withhold help," he said. That help, he added, could be in the form of funding, manpower and equipment.

Jodi Moomaw, 911 systems manager, said the national grid will be particularly useful in the event of a disaster that elicits a state or federal response.

"We already have a grid system, but if we had a disaster with federal or state people coming in, a national grid would be useful because that's what they use." she said.

Bill Grimes can be reached at 217-347-7151, ext. 132, at bill.grimes@effinghamdailynews.com, or on Twitter @EDNBGrimes.

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