COTTONWOOD HEIGHTS — Roger Kehr didn't move to Utah to make Cottonwood Heights America's best-prepared city, it's just worked out that way.
This is no idle boast. Cottonwood Heights, a municipality smack in the middle of the Salt Lake Valley that wasn't even incorporated until 2005, is America's best-prepared place, according to none other than the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
As part of National Preparedness Month activities last fall, FEMA awarded its first-ever Collaborative Preparedness Training award to Cottonwood Heights in a competition that included all 2,396 cities and counties from across America that participate in Citizen Corps, a program that was implemented after 9/11. In the finals, Cottonwood Heights outlasted San Francisco; Douglas County, Pa.; and Escambia County, Fla.
If there's a flood, earthquake, tornado, oil spill, terrorist attack and so forth, Cottonwood Heights is the place to be.
Councilman Gordon Thomas and Kehr, the city's volunteer emergency communications director, flew to Washington, D.C., to pick up the national award.
Ever since, Kehr's been apologizing that everybody from Cottonwood Heights, a city of 30,000, couldn't be there.
"I'm just the pointy edge of the pencil," he says a year later, as Americans again observe National Preparedness Month. "We have hundreds of volunteers in our city that don't think anything at volunteering 20 hours a week and more."
It's Kehr who's their undisputed leader, though, a kind of Patton of Preparedness with an ideal resume for this kind of work: He's young (58), he's retired, he's perfectly willing to work for no pay, and he thinks the very best kind of giving is giving back.
"My parents always taught me to give back if you can," says Kehr. "For a lot of years, I've been trying to do that."
He and his wife, Florence, moved from Pennsylvania to Utah 10 years ago after their son graduated from high school. Suddenly they were empty nesters, not yet 50, and after two successful business ventures, Roger was already comfortably retired.
They were in the enviable position of being able to go where they pleased and do what they wanted.
They narrowed their choices to ski resorts — they both love winter sports — and visited several from one end of the country to the other.
Then Roger did what any astute husband does in such a situation: He let Florence make the final decision.
She chose the Wasatch Front/Salt Lake City.
"She likes the skiing, and she likes the city," says Roger.
Roger got a part-time job as a snowboard instructor at Snowbird, where he also helped out as a volunteer setting up the resort's mountaineering program. After doing that, he looked for another place to volunteer and contacted the Red Cross. But the Red Cross never called back.
That's when a neighbor suggested helping out the new city.
The new city in question was Cottonwood Heights, barely a year into incorporation. When the Kehrs first moved into the Cottonwood Heights area, it was still an unincorporated part of Salt Lake County.
Kehr met with Kelvyn Cullimore, the new mayor of the new city, and the next thing he knew, he was the new emergency communications director.
Over the past four years, Kehr and the aforementioned hundreds of other volunteers have designed a system that connects every single person and household in Cottonwood Heights. They've divided the city into 515 blocks, 15 precincts and six districts, all of them reporting up the line to one central command. There's a color-coded ribbon system that communicates house-by-house need even if there's no power and a priority system based on what the colors indicate.
"No matter if it's the worst snowfall, worst earthquake, worst flood, worst wildfire, worst whatever, we want to know about it quickly, and we want to be able to help. That's basically the short version of what we're doing," says Kehr.
The system got a test just this summer when Cottonwood Creek flooded.
Within minutes of the alarm sounding that the banks were about to overflow, volunteers were summoned to Brighton High School to fill sandbags.
"We had a huge number of people from all over the city there instantly," says Roger. "There was not one area that got flooded."
The result was the opposite of Katrina.
"The goal is you don't want anyone to get hurt; you don't want anything bad to happen to anybody," says the pointy edge of the best-prepared city in the country. "It's a great goal. You'll never completely succeed, but you sure should try.'
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.