Jack Blanchard: A Jack of Many Trades… & Master Of Them All.
By Lisa Howard
TEN YEARS ON THE BERKLEY CITY COUNCIL, FOUR YEARS ON THE LOCAL EMERGENCY POLICY COUNCIL FOR OAKLAND COUNTY, 30 years in the Army and Army Reserve, 37 years as a volunteer firefighter…and that’s not even getting into his career as an engineer.
If it involves emergency management, Jack Blanchard has done it. “I love emergency management — it applies to everything, from schools to cities,” Blanchard says. (Not surprisingly, he’s also been involved with Berkley Schools.)
He initially worked with emergency management in his active Army days back in the 1970s. “One of my jobs was to open up the Ohio Turnpike after a big snowstorm,” he explains. “I was running operations from North Carolina, flying in airport snowplows and snowblowers and moving in Army units to help clear the expressway. It was a major effort.”
NOW, HAVING RECEIVED HIS CERTIFICATION AS A PROFESSIONAL EMERGENCY MANAGER by the Michigan State Police, Blanchard spends a lot of time putting long-term planning into place for Oakland County concerns including big local events like the Woodward Dream Cruise and the Berkley Art Bash.
Between public-safety, food-service and traffic-control plans, overall event plans can be a 100+ pages long. “People don’t realize how much is involved in putting on these events,” says Blanchard. “We make sure they’re pulled off safely. We do a lot of long-term planning so that if something happens it will be very easy to address.”
In addition to events, a big part of emergency management is dealing with climate-related issues like flooding. As most Berkley residents know, flooding is a perennial problem, in large part because it’s a regional problem. Blanchard explains that while the City can help mitigate some flooding, heavy rainfall to the west can cause big problems.
“We have sewers coming in from Southfield passing through Berkley that we dump our water into. And when we have really torrential rain, the sewers get supercharged and we can’t get water into them,” he says. “So, we’re working hard to figure out ways to temporarily store the rainwater, like installing big rainwater storage systems under-neath parking lots.”
When building their parking lot the Library put in a system, for example, and whenever any new major development is built going forward, the builders will be required to put systems underneath it so that the water can run in there and then be released slowly into the drain system. Another useful tactic is to slow down water going into sewers in the streets, allowing the water to sit on the surface for a little longer means less pressure on the sewers, pressure that could otherwise force water up into people’s houses. The City is also looking at installing rain gardens to help capture and soak up excessive rain.
WHEN HE’S NOT DRAWING UP PLANS TO IMPROVE CITY INFRASTRUCTURE AND EVENTS, Blanchard serves on the Oakland County Incident Management Team, assisting in searches for missing persons, helping out when a tornado hits, and working with events outside of Berkley like the Detroit fireworks and Milford Memories summer festival.
During the pandemic, he also closely tracked what Berkley spent for various needs since some of that overlapped with receiving FEMA funding. As he points out, any emergency manager worth their salt knows that keeping impeccable records is the key to potential future reimbursement.
“We have a good team in City Hall,” Blanchard says. “In terms of the future of Berkley, everything I’ve seen so far is positive. We’re fixing the roads and redoing water mains, our DDA Director is working on recruiting businesses and we’re getting a lot of new residents. I think the city is going to develop even more.”
As if that weren’t enough, Blanchard has also been the City Council Liaison to the Berkley Area Chamber of Commerce for the last ten years. Well done, Jack!
