OPCD #SHOWUP Spotlight
OPCD Staff
Here at OPCD, we believe in going above and beyond to serve the city of New Orleans. Recently our city experienced Hurricane Ida. For this employee spotlight, we would like to thank our entire staff of dedicated heroes who worked through the storm. They not only provided services to Orleans Parish, but supported one another and we felt it fitting to highlight every department.
Our Heroes Under the Headset, that make everything we do possible, put in an amazing amount of effort to take calls from all over the city. During the storm, our emergency communications specialists worked around the clock to provide top tier emergency consultation and were truly our calm during the storm. They were aided in this duty by our 3-1-1 specialists, who answered non-emergency calls persistently alongside them.
Under the leadership of OPCD’s facility manager our facilities team took on the immense task of keeping OPCD up and running during an integral time. Working 16+ hour shifts our facilities team maintained our generators, secured compromised entryways, and performed hourly rounds to monitor building infrastructure. The facilities team did a great job by preforming these tasks on top of their normal duties, and we at OPCD are beyond grateful to them.
The continuous work of our technical support staff allowed us to combat many of the technological problems that we faced throughout the storm. As a unit, they dealt with the momentary lapses of our network and combatted it, by not only bringing it back online, but by also providing alternate routes of communication for the public to use. They have and continue to provide the power for our systems to run, so that our emergency communications specialists can be reached when they are needed most.
With an emergency it is pivotal to check for safety adherence, and our Training and Compliance team maintained the quality of calls by reviewing them and filing daily observation reports during the storm. They also internally supported OPCD by managing food distribution to the staff.
Our Human Resources and Public Engagement teams also provided necessary services to the public and OPCD staff. HR managed supplies from out of state donors and provided support to other departments, alleviating them of potential strain. The Public Engagement team tirelessly provided information to the general public and maintained consistent communication with New Orleans Office of Homeland Security in order to provide the most up to date information during the storm.
It is with the support of our various departments, and them going above and beyond their initial roles, that we along with the rest of the public were able to handle the storm as well as we were. We thank them and applaud their work and supreme dedication. #SHOWUP!