600K people will visit Indiana during the eclipse. Here’s how rural communities are preparing
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Chad Jenkins, director of the Brown County Emergency Management Agency, started preparing for game day 15 months ago. The “game” is the total solar eclipse on April 8, and it’s expected to bring over 600,000 fans to Indiana.
“This could be our Super Bowl or our Woodstock” is a phrase Jenkins has repeated.
What he means by that is advanced planning and rehearsal are critical. Last-minute planning and an underestimation of crowds can lead to scenes like the 1999 Woodstock music festival, he said, but with adequate planning akin to Super Bowl preparation, it can be a world-class event.
“My approach to this has been identifying the things that we know that we can plan for it—to identify the resources we’ll need,” Jenkins said. “We know that we’re going to run into some challenges on game day, but in identifying those in advance, those challenges are just going to test our playbook. They’re not going to be something that completely throws our game plan off.”
Rural and small communities across southern Indiana have spent months or years planning for the eclipse, which is expected to bring the largest amount of people ever to some parts of the region. Being in the path of totality presents a truly unique opportunity for counties to entice visitors to come back later while also serving as a significant preparation challenge for areas already low on resources, infrastructure and manpower.
Indiana is an attractive place for eclipse seekers, said Indiana Department of Homeland Security Planning Manager Allison Curry, pointing to its major interstate system, tourism opportunities, range of accommodations, and the luck of falling in line of the eclipse’s longer periods of darkness. Additionally, there is greater emphasis on the 2024 eclipse being a “once in a lifetime” event, Curry said, since the next American one won’t occur until 2044.
“This is a state event, but we know that it’s a local event,” she said. “Everything starts and ends local.”
Years of planning for three minutes
When planning for this event, Jenkins said he’s approached it like they do with any other disaster or incident—except they have time to prepare and know when it’s happening.
“Any emergency or incident really boils down to a resource battle, right?” he said. “You either have the resources to mitigate this or you don’t, and that process includes realizing where you don’t have those resources and knowing where and how to quickly ask for them to be able to bring them to bear and assist that.”
The Indiana Department of Homeland Security responds to natural disasters and emergencies. However, they’ve taken the reins of eclipse planning for the past two years and are working with communities. During the eclipse, Curry said they will operate their emergency operations center, observing the scene around the state and assisting when needed. They’ve coordinated with other state agencies as well as have been working with FEMA and other states to develop a regional approach to response planning.
“It takes every expert in their area of expertise to do the job,” Curry said. “And I think those first responders across Indiana are well prepared and ready to respond and work on April 8 to make sure that we keep everyone safe and everybody has a safe day.”
Throughout the planning process, Curry said they’ve divvied up the work into subcommittees covering communications and operations, education, public safety and health, resources and logistics, transportation, viewing, lodging and local support. For each of those committees, local emergency management could join to learn about different plans and resources. The state also organized “eclipse coffee talks” where emergency management directors could talk about their struggles and share solutions.
Local preparation for a local event
Each community is unique and requires different levels of planning.
“There is no one size fits all,” said Hannah Jones, eclipse liaison at the Indiana University Center for Rural Engagement. Jones and the Center for Rural Engagement built an eclipse planning toolkit that acts as a framework guide rather than a set of instructions.
The center is also helping communities prepare with eclipse scholars, who are partnered with communities to plan and build programming, as well as through a microgrant program supporting arts and cultural events in the path of totality.
Preparation for an event of this magnitude boils down to questioning the things taken for granted. Will traffic prevent first responders and medical personnel from getting to work on time? Do grocery stores need to schedule larger shipments weeks in advance? Is there enough parking and bathrooms?
“All of that influx of individuals reside within those rural counties, so that day, that incident is in the hands of that local responder and emergency manager,” Curry said. “Trying to just share ideas amongst other emergency groups, other border counties, sharing resources amongst other counties is pretty much how we’ve looked at it—more of a team effort to make sure everybody’s on the same page and all feel they have the support they need.”
Cindy Barber lives in the path of totality in Daviess County, where she has been a part of her community’s expansive eclipse plan. She also is a community development educator for Purdue Extension, where she’s been apart of the crew accumulating resources, airing webinars and spreading the word to eclipse planners, and specifically, people working in agriculture and agritourism.
Counties have each been working together to fill gaps and find solutions, Barber said, but a major takeaway for her was that each county’s needs are different. Concerns ring the same, she said, but how solutions are scaled or what plans are implemented need to be tailored.
It’s the little things that Barber said the community is stepping up to fill. School buses used as shuttles will tap into a reserved gas supply. A gas station will add more electric car chargers. Efforts are being made to educate Amish folks and give them eclipse glasses.
Barber kept falling back to the same point of how this event has really brought the community together—both in preparation and soon in execution.
“Rural communities do county fairs really well. They do Fourth of July festivals really well. They do, you know, lots of annual events that happen that bring in thousands of people,” she said. “This is just scaled up and a different time of year but an opportunity nonetheless for groups that don’t realize how good they are at managing that sort of size of events.”
What are we preparing for
In a January letter to Brown County Commissioners, Jenkins listed potential hazards and risks associated with hosting the eclipse. He listed traffic, supply chain disruptions, cell service outages, increased emergency response call volume, strained water and sewer systems and power outages. However, about two weeks out, he is confident they have the game plans ready to deal with whatever happens.
Chad Jenkins, director of the Brown County Emergency Management Agency, talks about his “game plan.”
“We’ve had a couple strategy sessions—some folks call them war games—where we sit and looked at our plans and talk through the different capabilities we have across the county to see where any gaps may exist and then prioritize those gaps and work towards finding the resources to close them,” he said.
The largest takeaway from the 2017 partial solar eclipse for organizers was the severe congestion on major interstates. Eclipse-goers reported sitting in traffic for up to 12 hours. State and local officials are pushing for visitors to “come early and stay late.”
“The only solution to a lot of traffic is less traffic,” he said.
Traffic can also bog down emergency response times, Jenkins said, which is why they are strategically placing first responders around the county. As for manpower, he said they are relying on law enforcement reserves and volunteers to staff different operations. He said he has a heat map of where they expect people to be throughout the county.
Curry equated potential communication outages to be like going to a Colts game. The high volume of people can overwhelm the network, resulting in undeliverable tests and spotty service. People should come up with their own plans in case they get separated, she said, in addition to a town’s reunification center.
Organizers also said they’ve worked extensively with event planners, grocers, restauranteurs and local business owners to ensure they understand the demand coming and what is needed to stay afloat.
Hundreds of communities are also holding events, which can serve as a form of crowd control. With hundreds of thousands of people filtering through a county, event planning means knowing where those people are and can lead to better resource allocation, making sure bathrooms, food, emergency response and shelter are in the right place.
“People are going to come to your town either way,” Jones said. “Having programming in place is in some ways, a safety element. You’ve planned for an influx of people that are going to enter your county, and maybe they need something to do, and you don’t want them to get bored and find the wrong thing to do. You want them to have something to do and make good memories.”
The Hoosier National Forest in Bedford has been planning for the eclipse for over a year, said Marion Mason, spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service. Several takeaways from their sister forest, the Shawnee National Forest, which was in the path of totality in 2017, informed their prep, and they have been able to better prepare for it through one major idea: the park is going to see more people than they expect.
“There’s nothing that compares to this,” Mason said.
The national forest will have its entire staff on duty for six days around the eclipse as well as bringing in additional law enforcement and forest protection officers. They are focused on ensuring overall safety as well as campfire safety and leaving no trace at their campsites, she said. Environmentally fragile areas are also being blocked off with signage, so overflow campers don’t end up there.
While the eclipse is a fun educational event, Curry said it’s her and other emergency management personnel’s jobs to think about and plan for the “what ifs.”
“I’m hopeful for a lot of children and Hoosiers across our state to experience something they’ve never seen before and may never see again,” Curry said. “However, with the caveat that at the end of the day, we’ll do all that we can to keep Hoosiers and those who come into Indiana safe for this event.”
Education is preparation
The eclipse is different than what most emergency management agencies deal with since it is an event, not an incident. A large piece of the puzzle to adequate preparation is education, experts said.
Many headaches people can prepare for ahead of time, Curry said. Tasks include filling up your tank the week before, packing your car with necessities, buying proper eclipse glasses, communicating safety plans and meeting spots with friends and family.
Messaging has also been very important for the forest service. Mason said they’ve been making a concerted effort to tell people how to be safe in the crowds as well as how to treat the parks so they leave no trace.
“We’re definitely going to be out there to do our best to keep people safe and keep the resources safe and make sure people know what the regulations are,” Mason said.
Tourism
Many communities are also using the lure of the eclipse as a tourism opportunity. Some counties have been planning for years to make sure they have the basics of safety and resource management mapped out but also how they create events that show off their community.
“That’s what makes it so special is it really is only a few minutes that you experience totality,” Jones said. “But there’s all of the months that went into planning for it, and the years that people were thinking about it, and then all of the time after reflecting upon it. So, it’s a few minutes, but you can really stretch that into years for your community.”
The Indiana forest service is hoping for a similar reverberation from the eclipse as the Shawnee, where visitation numbers have been up ever since.
“Between preparation and having everyone out there and eyes and ears everywhere and being able to respond immediately to situations,” Mason said, “we feel like that’s as prepared as we can be.”
While her county is smaller with a population of about 32,000, Barber said I-69 likely means big crowds during the eclipse. Her region has a full slate of events all along the corridor, and she and other planners laughed that there will be no shortage of people.
“There’s no competition,” she said. “There’s enough for everybody.”
Resources for communities can be found on the eclipse landing pages for the IU Center for Rural Engagement and the Purdue Extension.
Resources on how to be prepared can be found on the IDHS’s eclipse landing page and the DNR’s website.