A man with many hats

CIBOLA COUNTY, N.M. – Cibola County Emergency Manager Dustin Middleton has lived in Cibola County since October of 2012 and has been the emergency manager since September of 2015. Middleton has an extensive background in emergency service, particularly in the fire service. Before moving to Cibola County, Middleton lived in Arizona and gained 12 years of fire experience there. Overall, Middleton has worked in the fire service for 21 years.

Upon arrival to Cibola County, Middleton worked as both a reserve deputy for the Cibola County Sheriff’s Office and a captain for the fire department at Western Refining. Middleton was a man wearing many hats right from the beginning of his time in Cibola County, and it didn’t stop there. Middleton moved on to become involved with a local fire department, and soon enough, he was in charge of both the fire service and emergency management services.

Now, Middleton is involved with a myriad different services, duties, and roles, including Fire Marshal, investigating fires for the county, handling administrative duties for the fire services, responding to calls and staying active with the fire departments, handling communications for the fire departments and Sheriff’s office, helping maintain radio systems, preparing for the wildland fire season by assisting U.S. Forest services, serving as the Red Cross leader for Cibola County, and more.

“There’s a whole gamut of stuff, I mean, you’d have to have probably a whole paper to get down everything I do,” said the emergency manager with a laugh.

Within his role as emergency manager, Middleton also is tasked with many duties. One of the main aspects is for him to oversee the workings of all the different agencies within the area to ensure that everyone is working together. “Basically, as an emergency manager, you’ve got to have a working knowledge of emergencies and how they are to be handled. You’ve got to have a better than average understanding of the incident command system and how it works, because we do work with multiple jurisdictions. When an incident breaks out, it’s not just one person ultimately in charge of it; it generally gets moved into what they call a unified command, where each entity is responsible for their personnel, and you have to be able to work together.”

Another important part of Middleton’s job as emergency manager is “to prepare for and/or maintain plans for different types of events.” Middleton works with many agencies around the county to develop these plans, whether it’s plans specific to weather emergencies, pandemic emergencies, et cetera. There is such a wide array of incidents to make plans for, and it is Middleton’s job to make sure the county has those plans and is prepared for anything. “A lot of what we do is preparing for [anything]. So, we bring training, stuff like that, in for our first responders, and try to get them all to stay up-to-date with their national incident management and/or ICF.”

The county, of course, did not have any specific plans for COVID-19, Middleton said, but they did have plans covering the influenza and the many variations that would appear, so they did have somewhat of a springboard when they began to combat the virus.

According to Middleton, who dealt with the pandemic closely in a personal manner like the rest of the world, but also in a professional manner, the last year was “stressful to say the least.” Middleton worked very closely with the Department of Health to coordinate and assist with large testing sites and vaccination pods for the public. Middleton was a big part of the COVID-19 Task Force, helping combat the pandemic the past year. Middleton also played a role in making sure that Cibola General Hospital, local law enforcement, and fire departments were equipped with as much PPE (personal protective equipment) as they could get.

Middleton also reported that they have recently been able to slow their large testing site and vaccination pod efforts. There is one more large testing site event this week that will conclude those efforts, and then one or two more large vaccination pod events that will conclude those efforts as well.

With these positive results and the state starting to open up again, Middleton said, “We can actually take a moment and take a deep breath. Because it has been extremely stressful throughout the whole year. Just trying to make sure everybody is where they need to be and have what they need to protect themselves and protect the community.”

Middleton humbly added, “It’s not just one person, it’s a community thing. This really couldn’t have been done without the help of our public and our public safety staff. It’s not just one person behind the scenes. My job is to coordinate and make sure they have what they need to do their jobs. It’s definitely a community effort in combatting this pandemic.”