Over Memorial Day weekend, devastating storms hit the vast majority of the county. Cities like Bentonville and Rogers saw substantial damage but also saw the most responsive help. As we reported on Ozarks at Large right after the storms, more rural areas of the county, like Decatur, lacked the sizable local government infrastructure to have the same kind of response as their bigger city counterparts.
Garfield, on the other side of the county from Decatur, also experienced power outages. But Mayor Gary Blackburn said he felt like — in one small way — Garfield was prepared.
“I felt like we were doing what cities are supposed to do, and that’s providing services at an economical or certainly reasonable price,” Blackburn said.
The service that Mayor Blackburn is talking about might surprise you: a free-to-use solar-powered phone charger. He said the charging station in Hamilton Park was used around the clock following the storm damage that left some residents without power for up to a week.
“It can charge four phones at a time, and it wasn’t unusual to walk out there and have all four tied up at any given time,” he said.
Now you might be asking yourself: What compels a relatively rural town of 593 people to buy and install a solar-powered phone charging station?
That’s where Susan Hartman comes in.
“Natural disasters don't discriminate based on population or size of a community," Hartman said. "We have a number of rural communities throughout Arkansas that in a natural disaster can be somewhat isolated from the resources available in larger communities.”
Hartman is a project manager for E-R Assist, an organization that helps provide resources to communities to prepare for disasters of any and all kinds. Hartman said her work with Garfield and Mayor Blackburn initially began as a project to help them buy a generator.
“I was just poking around on the internet looking for a variety of resilience-building ideas, and the solar-powered cell phone charger popped up," she said. "I just knew it would be the perfect addition to the hazard mitigation and resilience building package we were developing for the city of Garfield.”
You can find a photo of the charger on our website, but I’ll be the first to tell you it’s not exactly a revolutionary piece of hardware. Hartman said once it arrived, Garfield city staff got to work installing it.
“It wasn’t really too difficult to put together," she said. "When you look at it, it’s fairly simple in its components.”
The cobalt blue station is thin, stands around 8 feet tall, and sits on the corner of the concrete pad of a pavilion at Hamilton Park just off Highway 62. Mayor Blackburn said he was on board to make the purchase immediately, but he wasn’t sure just how much use it would get.
“I just thought people would charge their cell phones at home that have a way to do it, that they would plan for power outages," Blackburn said. "You know, a lot of people have a battery backup system of their own. I do. And my portable radio can be used to charge my particular cell phones if I'm out of power for an extended period of time. But apparently not everybody thinks like I do, thank goodness. And several of them were very happy. I would say this too: most of the people I saw out there were not from Garfield City maintenance. They were from in the county. But they were aware of it. We had publicized it. They saw it. People started using it. The word got out, word of mouth. And they just kept coming. It was great. It really was.”
Hartman said this unit cost around $4,000 at the time of the purchase, which doesn’t sound like a major investment, but for small local governments like Garfield, it can be.
“With the grant we received, the hazard mitigation grant through the Arkansas Division of Emergency Management, Garfield was able to have 75% of that cost reimbursed," Hartman said. "But that particular source of funding is limited. And it has to cover a number of things, from generators and other things that for many communities are probably higher priority. So, you know, it's just a matter of a community deciding to either invest that amount of money, find a sponsor for the unit, something like that. $4,000 for what is provided through this piece of equipment is actually not very expensive at all.”
Mayor Blackburn said he agrees.
“They don’t cost anything in the big scheme of things.”
There’s also a variation of the solar-powered phone charging stations that are designed as benches. Hartman said she would love to see the bike trails across the region dotted with them.
“I look at the event Square 2 Square, for example, that's about a 40-mile stretch of trail," Hartman said. "And a lot could happen. There's emergencies that could arise if a person is trying to track that entire trail.”
As for Garfield, Mayor Blackburn said they are currently working on growing their charging station count.
“Well, we hope to close on a piece of property on Highway 62 in a couple of weeks," Blackburn said. "That will be our second park here in town. And yes, I will encourage the City Council to make part of that development project, a solar-powered cell phone charging station.”
In the meantime, you can head to Hamilton Park. Hopefully, the line is short.
