About Tazewell County EMA/ESDA

ESDA is an acronym for Emergency Services Disaster Agency. ESDA was established when the Department of Defense Office of Civilian Defense was abolished in 1975. As a majority of the local level civil defense programs were abandoned, most towns kept a civil defense unit of their own. After several years many individual states assumed the responsibility for local civil preparedness in times of natural or manmade disaster, while the federal government only handled large scale disasters covering multiple states.

ESDA was formed under the Carter and Reagan administrations to provide local communities support during disasters. ESDA was also given the responsibility of local Nuclear Preparedness after the end of Civil Defense. Most ESDA's are locally funded and work under direction of the local government and with the direction of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Our Mission

Our mission is deliberately broad. We are often activated to respond to situations as either a coordinating agency or a support agency. We maintain a versed staff of trained volunteers in many different areas. Tazewell County ESDA is a municipal agency comprised of volunteers who are on call 24 hours a day / 7 days a week. One of our main function, and probably what we are most well known for, is severe weather coordination. This includes a network of storm spotters who are strategically deployed through-out the county to provide advanced warning of severe weather. All of our storm spotters maintain constant communications with the EOC (emergency operations center) to provide immediate notification of severe weather conditions. The EOC then evaluates and provides detailed information to the National Weather Service. From this information, warning sirens and other devices are able to be activated to provide unsuspecting citizens with enough advanced warming to seek safety.

The Tazewell County ESDA is also known for their SAR (search and rescue) team. This team is composed of highly trained ground search members, EMT & Paramedics, as well as a scent tracking search dog. Our teams are able to deploy in a short notice to any area in the county and many surrounding counties in the state. Once on scene we have specialized communications operators and GPS/mapping personnel that can provide constant data to the ground team.

We also provide traffic and crowd control for law enforcement as well as maintain a complex system of civil defense sirens.