Marion County Emergency Management Director Jeff Anderson spent much of 2020 focusing on response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He says that he and his colleagues typically deal with emergencies that are short-lived in nature, but that this situation changed the way they operate and communicate.

“We’ve always had a great relationship with Marion County Public Health and the hospitals. COVID made it a daily interaction. For a period of around three months, Public Health Director Kim Dorn was actually stationed in our office in what we called the war room, that was set up with technological displays so we could interact virtually with our partners. So we’ve always had a great relationship with them, Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management. We just have never seen a response that has gone on this long where we were having these daily interactions. So this one was different, to that degree, from other events.”

Anderson was involved in weekly updates provided by Marion County Health officials throughout much of this past spring and summer. Hear more from Marion County Emergency Management Director Jeff Anderson on an upcoming In Depth.