GOSHEN, N.Y.—As dozens of officials quietly conversed on the Orange County Emergency Services Center floor, a man on the loudspeaker sharply interrupted.
“A tropical storm warning and flood warning are in effect. Heavy rainfall has produced widespread flooding, numerous road closures, utility outages, downed trees with down wires, continued river concerns. Response priorities include evacuation, sheltering, transportation issues, power failures, and the need for power restoration, resource tracking, and monitoring river gages,” he said.
“This is a drill.”
The annual full-scale emergency exercise was held on Sept. 9 at the Emergency Services Center in Goshen, located near the Orange County Sheriff’s Office and Correctional Facility.
Coordinator for the Division of Emergency Management Shannon Fisher told The Epoch Times that this year’s emergency simulation would mirror Hurricane Irene, which hit Orange County in August 15 years ago.
Commissioners, administrators, and emergency management specialists sat at their desks in the great hall above the county’s 911 call center. They were delivered problems and scenarios via their computers, including issues that needed to be dealt with during the 2011 hurricane, to see whether they would be ready if the same thing were to happen today.
The event was overseen and evaluated with the help of the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services and veterans involved in emergency management during the Hurricane Helene response in North Carolina.
“Let’s get the subject matter experts who do this every day in here to evaluate how we’re doing,” Fisher said.
The coordinator said that flooding is one of the top threats to Orange County, and that as the county develops, so does its emergency response.
Since Irene, the county has grown in population and received new equipment. Fisher said that the exercise helps organizers become more efficient with limited resources and improves communication among agencies during emergencies.
“Nobody has money for stuff, resources, people. Everybody’s short-handed,” she said. “People tend to work in silos. … Are you working with the partner agencies? Is community development physically getting up and coming and talking to Red Cross? You know that’s the other part we’re trying to push in here.”
Orange County has faced several flooding disasters in recent decades, such as the Port Jervis and Highland Falls flooding in 2023 and Tropical Storm Ida in 2021.
Shannon Fisher (R) speaks with an evaluator at the Orange County Emergency Services Center during the annual emergency exercise in Goshen, N.Y., on Sept. 9, 2026. (Oliver Mantyk/The Epoch Times)
The situations they dealt with included flooding along the Delaware and Neversink rivers and voluntary evacuations of many populated areas in Deerpark and Port Jervis.
Officials made the decision to issue mandatory evacuation orders for the Myers Grove area near the Neversink River, based on the area having a history of flooding. Coordination with the sheriff’s office began as the availability of troopers for security, staging zones, and state police cooperation were evaluated.
The next issue on the table was flooding of the D&H Canal Park, brought up by Parks and Recreation Commissioner Travis Ewald. The on-site museum had to be protected from rising waters and the old canal because of its unknown condition.
Preparations for actions such as filling sandbags were quickly sorted, and they moved on to the state of utilities, phone and radio towers, fire departments, and other items.
Orange County Executive Steve Neuhaus (L) in the command room at the Orange County Emergency Services Center during the annual emergency exercise in Goshen, N.Y., on Sept. 9, 2026. (Oliver Mantyk/The Epoch Times)
“You have 36 departments here. We’re all preparing. What do we do in case of an emergency? Right, systems are down. Communications are down. How do I get my job done? That’s continuity of operations,” he said.
Erik Denega, Public Works commissioner, was taken out of the exercise in a random chance scenario.
Fisher told the room: “Commissioner Denega is now out of service. … He is now on his way to the hospital.”
Denega told The Epoch Times that his removal from the scenario would help better prepare his staff to handle emergencies and keep the department in the game when unseen circumstances arise.
“We deal with stormwater for a living for the most part. We deal with the roads and the bridges for a living,” he said. “So those are all points of critical infrastructure that can have a wide impact on the public and transportation, especially for emergency responses.”
Denega’s staff of just a few had to pick up the commissioner’s previous responsibilities of coordinating the department’s response and communicating with the command room.
“We try to have a lot of crossover training amongst our staff so that they are prepared for something like that. And I don’t doubt at all that my deputy commissioner who’s here today is very comfortable moving into that role in my absence,” he said.
