While it hasn’t exactly been business as usual, the Mid-Ohio Valley Health Department’s Environmental Health employees had already been doing a lot of their work out of the building before the Wood County office suffered from a water line break over the Memorial Day weekend, causing damages to the building and equipment, and all operations had to be moved elsewhere to continue to serve their clients until a new building could be found.
“The sanitarians are field workers, so it’s not that different for them to do their on-site inspections and work out of their cars,” said Nicole Needs, Director of Environmental Health for MOVHD. “And we already had go bags ready as part of our Continuity of Operations Plan, and a suitcase full of supplies to set up home offices at home (for those in administration.)
It was a fairly smooth transition for us, I am proud of my department for how we transitioned to being out of office.”
But along the way, there were a few hiccups as well that caused some issues.
“The main issue was mail and it was our billing time,” said Needs. “We usually mail out billing in May, and we were a bit behind, and were still mailing out our largest quantity of invoices (when the water break happened.)”
Needs said because the mail at the post office could only be held for 30 days, a P.O. Box number had to be opened up, and the mail got held up for a couple of weeks. “We had some payments lost in the mail, permits got delayed for several weeks, and (because of the mail delivery delay) then we got a bunch at one time causing backups.”
She also said the lack of having a physical space meant coming up with new ways to communicate.
“We had sign in/sign out sheets in Wood, so we knew where all the sanitarians were going daily, and without being face-to-face, we had to use different methods.” Some of these methods included holding informal lunch meetings as well as email and phone calls.
Not having a physical space also took a toll on their community outreach.
“Unfortunately, we had to stop doing in-person food handlers classes and cancel our September ServSafe class.” Needs said. “We were able to hold our June ServSafe class, but decided to postpone future classes until we had our own office again.”
While Calhoun, Pleasants, Ritchie, Roane and Wirt County have their regular hours and buildings, they were still affected by the Wood County building closure.
“It affected them too, there were some delays for them, communications-wise, and they are getting more calls (when people couldn’t call the Wood office), and the delays for permits also affected all of the counties.”
But Needs is proud of her employees for continuing all of their hard work, even in the face of uncertain times.
“We did 471 activities just in June,” Needs said. Activities for the department include food inspections, septic and water well inspections and permits, and animal encounter investigations, just to name a few, and the summer time tends to be the busiest for them with mass gatherings happening during the nice weather.
“We’re still trying to operate as close to normal as we can, still doing inspections, and we are trying to provide the same services to the best of our abilities.”
Questions for the Wood County Environmental Health Department can be made by calling 304-588-0499. Contact Calhoun County by calling 304-354-6101. To contact Pleasants County, call 304-684-2461. To contact Ritchie County, call 304-643-2917. To contact Roane County, call 304-927-1480. To contact Wirt County, call 304-275-3131.