Winona's emergency manager honored for efforts in Madeline Kingsbury case

Sep. 26—WINONA — No one wants to face an emergency, least of all Ben Klinger.

But as the Winona County emergency manager, Klinger said he's prepared for when an emergency comes his way.

"Thankfully, emergencies don't happen every day," Klinger said. "I'd be fine if they don't happen. I just want to make sure we're ready when they do."

On Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2023, Klinger was named the Minnesota Emergency Management Director of the Year.

A member of the Winona County Jail staff as well as a volunteer police officer, firefighter and EMT for the city of Goodview, Klinger has been the county's emergency management director since May 2018.

It's been an eventful five years.

His work this past year, though, set him apart from his peers across the state. Klinger was the organizer and point person for the county during the

search for Madeline Kingsbury,

a Winona woman who was reported missing on March 31, 2023, and whose body was subsequently found in Fillmore County on June 7, 2023, near the town of Mabel.

"I can remember where I was when I got the phone call that she'd been found,: Klinger said. "I was picking up one of my kids from school. I thought, 'Now, it's real. She really is gone.' I felt sadness for her family. I was talking with her parents every couple of days."

Klinger said he first got involved in the case the day after she went missing when Winona Police Chief Tom Williams reached out to ask for assistance from the county's search and rescue team.

When initial efforts failed to located Kingsbury, a call for volunteers went out, and Klinger was there, organizing the efforts. The regional incident management team for Emergency Management Region I, a region that includes Winona County, was mobilized. Madeline Kingsbury's friends and family brought groups to the effort.

All this effort needed logistical control and a leader. In stepped Klinger.

"I can tell you that we could not have done this investigation without Ben's leadership," said Williams in nominating Klinger for the award. "Ben stepped in and took over the searches and was the point of contact for anything search-related, which allowed law enforcement to focus on the investigation."

Klinger said his experience being those boots on the ground as a police officer and first responder help him understand the needs of people who are working an emergency situation and how to best help them do the job.

In

the case of the search,

it was more than just organizing groups to cover areas of interest in the investigation. Klinger made sure that groups were led by people with awareness of public safety issues so that lay volunteers would know what to do if they found something suspicious.

"We gave them a handout. This is what you're looking for. If you find something, send your GPS location and don't touch anything," Klinger said. "Don't take photos and put it on Facebook. Thankfully, we didn't have any of that."

And, being that point person, Klinger spent a lot of time working with and talking with those who

loved and knew Kingsbury.

Through a lot of false leads and sometimes frustrating efforts, he communicated with organizers of groups such as Kingsbury's sorority sisters, her family and Minnesota United, a group that helped in the search efforts.

When it was all done, when Kingsbury was found, Klinger said the emotions ran the gamut.

Of course, the search for Maddi was not his first full-scale emergency. In 2020, the world was

hit with the COVID-19 pandemic.

"When I applied for this job, I knew pandemics were listed in our emergency management plan, but I never thought I'd be dealing with it," Klinger said.

That emergency, he said, was a lot different than things like a derailed train or a multicar pileup on the highway.

"It's not like a house that's on fire that you can get water on," Klinger said of the COVID emergency. "It was a large team effort. I felt like a ringmaster bringing all these people together. We had a lot of great people."

After the initial public health concern of masking, keeping safe distances and shutting down to slow the spread of the virus, there came the

multilayered efforts of getting vaccinations out to people

in descending order of need.

That, he said, relied a lot on logistics. Did the county have enough vaccine, but not too much so it didn't go to waste? Were there enough syringes? Did they have a space to administer the vaccines and the personnel to do the job?

"Emergency management is all about making relationships and knowing the people in your community so you can call on them in an emergency," Klinger said.

For distributing the COVID vaccines, that meant finding people qualified to administer shots. A retired pharmacist who was still licensed was a big help, he said.

And of course, he needed to arrange for people to return for a second dose, track which people got which vaccine, and keep tabs on who from which risk group had been vaccinated.

It's an emergency management plan Klinger hopes to never implement again. In fact, he'd be happy if his job consisted of training and teaching for emergencies that never happen.

"If I put a plan into place, something bad has happened to somebody," Klinger said.