Monticello Live

The Mayors Office hosted an eclipse planning meeting Monday where local City and County officials, first responders, School Resource Officers and UAM staff discussed preparations for the upcoming April 8 Eclipse event.

The meeting coordinated and addressed all local vital services and potential issues locally that could occur, such as diminished cellular phone service that could occur due to the large number of people videoing the event statewide and the expected increase in traffic to and from the park of totality in Central Arkansas.

“We expect travelers passing through Monticello in route to the event and coming from the event. We want to make sure that we do our part to ensure increased traffic, anticipate increased purchases of fuel by those travelers and other areas that could affect our town are covered”.

Due to the potential of so many people on cellular phones capturing these events, the city wants citizens to remember that during the event, if there are issues with cellular phones to utilize landline phones.

Police, fire and local ambulance services were briefed on an expected increase in traffic flow in monticello and to have staff on hand to address these potential concerns.

The Mayors office is delivering reminders to local gas stations to remind them of the event and ensure that sufficient preparations are made to accommodate an uptick in travelers.

“We are glad this event is garnering national attention, and travelers from all over the world to come to Arkansas, with many visitors
passing though Monticello. But we want to make sure that our local vendors are aware that our citizens are a priority and we want to ensure that our gas stations have fuel for our people and not just those passing through to the path of totality”

An additional 500,000 Arkansans are expected to travel to the areas of totality, according to a news release issued in December by the Arkansas House of Representatives. About 83,000 visitors are expected to view the eclipse from the 21 state parks in Arkansas located within the path of totality.

So this means 500k people from Arkansas will be traveling and not counting out of state visitors.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024 at 12:43 am and is filed under Business, City, County, Police /Legal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.