Nye County officials sorry for fire information lag time

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.

Carol Johnston, owner of KC's Outpost, about 10 miles from US Ecology, said she was serving customers on a patio Sunday when she "heard a big boom" then looked up and saw a big puff of smoke.

"Why didn't they evacuate the town then?" she asked in a telephone interview Wednesday.

On Monday she saw a helicopter equipped with radiation detection sensors "flying back and forth all day long. If they found anything toxic, it would have been too late," she said.

Authorities shut down a 140-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 95 for 24 hours during and after the flash floods and fire.

"This was the mother of all traffic jams. It was unbelievable," Payne said, adding that the floods and fire "stretched us to the max."

Contact Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308. Find him on Twitter: @KeithRogers2