Extreme Weather Tests Huntley's Emergency Plans

Six months ago, it was the extreme snowfall.

Last week, it was the extreme lightening storm.

This week, it’s the extreme heat.

Weather emergencies seem to be popping up a lot lately, but Huntley is ready for just about anything.

The village works closely with the McHenry County Emergency Management department and has its own emergency plan that it activates in those cases.

In February, more than 20 inches of snow fell and caused everything to shut down. Huntley officials took action, providing updates, information and sending out snowplows to clear subdivisions. Huntley police rescued stranded motorists on snowmobiles, equipment on loan from a local businessman.

McHenry County was declared a disaster area and towns, like Huntley, were able to apply for reimbursements for services performed during the storm.

“I hope we never have to go through that again,” Johnson said Monday, referring to February’s blizzard. Huntley will begin putting its snow plan together later this year but “we continually look at our performance, whether it was that incident or another one,” he said. “There are many things that we did well and there were things we frankly know we can do better.”

Last week’s storm once again put village staff in emergency mode. Huntley had 2,100 ComEd customers out of power, Johnson said. Luckily, a majority of customers had power restored by Tuesday afternoon, he said.

The village monitored the situation, set up cooling centers and let people know what services were available to them, like where to dispose of food lost during the outage.

While McHenry County has again been declared a disaster following last week's storm, Huntley was fortunate and did not see the amount of damage other towns and counties saw, Johnson said.

This week, Johnson and his staff are monitoring the heat wave to see if the village will have to active its emergency operation plan.

“If we see it (the heat) continue, we will certainly discuss and evaluate the situation,” Johnson said. “We are fortunate that a lot of people have air conditioning here. We will encourage people to check on neighbors and check on families...to make sure everyone is safe.”

For updates on the weather, click here to go to the National Weather Service’s website.