Nye County officials sorry for fire information lag time
by Keith Rogers | Las Vegas Review-Journal
Oct 21, 2015
http://bit.ly/1MdPYjr

[snip]

Nye County's sheriff and emergency management chief apologized for not keeping Beatty residents better informed about Sunday's fire in a radioactive waste trench that followed widespread flash flooding.

"What we apologized for was failure to communicate with them more frequently than we did," Emergency Management Director Vance Payne said Wednesday.

"We could have given them some very generic information that there was a fire at US Ecology and there was no apparent danger at this time," he said.

He intends to have a resident from each county community embedded in his department's communications network to provide residents with quick and accurate information about local emergencies. He said drills will be conducted to fine-tune how the system works.

Payne said he and Sheriff Sharon Wehrly met with about 50 residents at the Beatty town hall to discuss the "fast moving event" that began with heavy rains that shut down roads and the subsequent fire Sunday afternoon in a closed, state-owned trench where low-level radioactive waste was buried in the 1970s at what is now known as the US Ecology site.