I am a county EM in a rural county. I still have an overabundance of PPE, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant left over from COVID. Almost 100% of everything I have was purchased with "COVID money". It was either purchased by the state EMA and allocated to each county, or with funds distributed to each county.
Gowns - nobody wanted these, even during COVID.
Tyvek suits - they are VERY small and flimsy.
Hand sanitizer - pocket sized bottles to gallon jugs, expired.
Disinfectant - expired
Disposable masks - I think they are still good.
N95 masks - I think they are still good.
We've tried giving supplies away and nobody wants any of it. My state EMA has not offered any guidance.
My daughter is thinking of getting an emergency management degree. She really loves tornados and natural disasters but she’s not good at math at all, so meteorology and atmospheric science is out (that’s ideally what she would have wanted to do if she was decent at math, but she really isn’t and she accepts that). So thinking EM might be close enough to helping during a natural disaster in one way or another. BUT from what I’ve seen, it’s almost impossible to get a job straight out of college unless you know someone or you’ve done a ton of volunteering.
Would you agree with this or disagree with this? Should I try and convince her to try a different major? Any advice would be helpful!
Environmental policy grad student looking to intern/work a summer with a county out west (CA, OR, WA, MT, or CO preferred) and trying to narrow my search. I've worked four seasons as a federal wildland firefighter but I'm interested in learning about the problem from a local government angle that emphasizes preparation and proactive measures rather than the "full suppression" stuff the fed will be in for the foreseeable future.
Any stand-out county programs/coordinating with good collaboration/prescribed fire? Places to avoid that don't have their stuff figured out yet?
This position is located within the Training & Development Bureau of the Florida Office of the Attorney General (OAG) and is responsible for developing, reviewing, maintaining, and coordinating the agency’s continuity of operations plan (COOP) before, during, and after emergency disaster incidents to ensure mission-essential functions can continue with minimal or no disruption during all types of disaster-related emergencies. This position is responsible for COOP Review, Training, and Exercises to ensure the agency’s plan is current and executable.
Hi everyone! I’m a high school junior in Texas currently working toward my EMT certification, and I have a school project about EMT career pathways.
I need to interview 4 professionals who earned an EMT credential and later advanced into different careers or higher professional positions. Each interview needs to last at least 15 minutes and can be done over Zoom or Google Meet.
My teacher requires the interviews to be from four different locations:
DFW, Texas
Outside DFW, but still in Texas
Outside Texas, within the United States
Outside the United States
One of the professionals must also have experience in firefighting or fire science.
I’m hoping to learn about your career journey, how your EMT background helped you, what additional education or certifications you needed, and what advice you would give someone starting out.
If you meet these requirements and would be willing to help, or if you know someone who might be interested, please comment or send me a message! I would really appreciate your time and help with my school project. Thank you!
So we're piloting a mustering software that connects to our control badge logs. This is where we get our baseline headcount vs. muster point check-ins during a drill. We like how it works so far, but since we're looking for edgecases, we can't take into account people who just tailgate behind others with badges. So of course we get our headcount wrong. How do you deal with these situations?
Hello, I recently got a job as a town planner and my first task is updating the county natural hazard mitigation plan (NHMP). Unfortunately the person that had my job prior left a mess and little to no information on guidelines or procedures on how to update a NHMP.
Although it’s been going successful in updating the plan. I’m having trouble figuring out how to update the county hazard rating process specifically for towns and cities. From the previous NHMP plan, it mentions that it used data from the NOAA storm events database. Although that did help with finding and updating the county’s risk assessment table, I cannot find the data for risk assessment tables for individual towns and cities that is similar to the NOAA storm events database.
I am an emergency manager trying to get more into security intelligence and I have notice many peers that have certificates in Basic Intelligence and Threat Analysis Course (BITAC) but cannot find the offering on any calendars nor any of the courses on this list. Is there a reason DHS has moved away from intelligence courses, and will they make a comeback?
There is something wonderfully reassuring about having a plan.
The maps are finished. Roles are assigned. Resources are identified. Everybody knows where they're supposed to go and what they're supposed to do.
Then reality shows up. Sometimes during an exercise. Sometimes during a real-world incident.
The river crests somewhere nobody expected. The primary access route is underwater. Cell service goes down. A critical resource can't get to you. The shelter location you planned to use has its own emergency. Three things nobody anticipated happen simultaneously.
And somebody looks around the room and says, "Well...now what?"
Welcome to Emergency Management.
I've spent my career working in Emergency Management and Emergency Operations, and I also grew up around the formal discipline of Creative Problem Solving. The more time I spend in this field, the more I find it undeniably clear that these two worlds belong together.
Disasters are messy, dynamic problems. Good Emergency Management depends on people being able to think effectively when the plan no longer quite fits the situation on the ground.
We are planning for tomorrow with yesterday's information
One of the core tenets of Emergency Management is planning. We assess hazards, identify vulnerabilities, develop scenarios, clarify roles, establish command structures, exercise our plans, learn from experience, and revise.
Good. Please don't stop doing any of that.
But there's an unavoidable problem. We are developing today's plans for tomorrow's events using yesterday's information. Climate conditions change. Communities change. Infrastructure ages. Technologies appear. Supply chains become more interconnected. Staff turns over. New vulnerabilities emerge.
Then there’s the wonderfully unpredictable variable found in every emergency plan: human beings. People do unexpected things.
That's why one of the most important Emergency Management capabilities may be the ability of people to creatively solve problems together when reality departs from the plan.
Creative Problem Solving is disciplined thinking
Mention creativity and some people immediately picture a room full of people shouting ideas while somebody writes them on a flip chart. That's sometimes part of the creative process. A very small part.
Creative Problem Solving is better understood as a disciplined way of managing thinking. We clarify the goal we're trying to achieve; gather data, input, and insight to deeply understand the situation; make sure we're solving the right problem(s); generate multiple possible responses; evaluate and strengthen promising ones; build an actionable plan; then implement, learn, and adapt. When well facilitated, the process is universally effective.
One of its most useful disciplines is deliberately separating divergent thinking from convergent thinking. First, expand the field: possible problems, potentially useful data, varied viewpoints, diverse ideas, and a rigorous look at potential weaknesses in proposed solutions. Then switch mental gears and choose what deserves attention now.
That separation matters because groups otherwise tend to converge around the loudest voice, the most persuasive speaker, the most stubborn planner, or the most senior person in the room. A good process gives competing perspectives enough oxygen to improve the team's thinking before hierarchy and judgment narrow the choices.
The result is useful in both halves of Emergency Management: a more thoughtful team during planning and a more adaptive team when the plan goes sideways.
CASE EXAMPLE | PRE-KATRINA PLANNING EFFORTS - THEN WHAT HAPPEND?
In 2004, FEMA and Louisiana officials brought more than 300 federal, state, local, and volunteer participants together to work through a fictional catastrophic hurricane striking New Orleans. Instead of only testing existing plans, the exercise was designed to guide the discovery of new potential challenges. Participants worked across multiple problem areas, and when new issues emerged, additional groups were created to address them. The process identified problems ranging from mass sheltering and medical care to search and rescue, transportation, and debris management. But identifying potential issues is not a plan.
A year later, Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of that planning exercise.
The fictional scenario had uncovered many of the real problems responders would encounter. But it also demonstrated the limits of divergence without disciplined follow-through. The exercise was never fully completed, some decisions remained unresolved, and many of its lessons were not fully implemented before Katrina arrived. Not because there wasn’t enough time, more because the planning process was incomplete because of how it was structured.
The lesson isn't that emergency managers need more brainstorming sessions. It is that good problem solving requires both expansion and reduction. Teams need enough freedom to discover the problems they didn't know they had, but eventually there needs to be a structured process to decide what matters, resolve competing options, assign responsibility, and turn the result into something people can actually use.
The first problem seen may not be the real problem to solve
Under pressure, human beings have an impressive ability to jump directly from "Something is wrong!" to "Here's what we should do!" Sometimes quick, well-informed action saves lives. Sometimes premature action makes things worse. Habitual responses, delivered with plenty of command confidence and too little thought, can have serious consequences.
Instead of immediately asking, "What should we do?" spend some time asking, "What problem are we actually trying to solve?" Are there problems inside the problem? Are there ways of seeing the situation we have not yet explored?
Consider a flooded community. "How might we evacuate residents?" may be exactly the right challenge. Or the more useful challenge may be how to shelter some residents safely in place, maintain access to medical care, protect people who will not evacuate, move resources when transportation routes fail, or communicate when primary systems are unavailable.
Same event. Different problem definitions. Different solutions.
Good emergency managers already do much of this intuitively. Creative Problem Solving makes the thinking deliberate, visible, and repeatable.
CASE EXAMPLE | FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI HOSPITAL EVACUATIONS
The Fukushima Daiichi disaster provides a good example of why the first problem we see may not be the whole problem.
Following the 2011 nuclear accident, hospitals in the evacuation zone faced an obvious challenge: get patients out. But many of those patients were elderly, bedridden, or dependent on ongoing, device-dependent medical care. Evacuation also meant considering transportation, staffing, medications, equipment, receiving facilities, and what would happen if normal care was disrupted.
At Futaba Hospital, 39 of 338 patients died during the period surrounding the evacuation. Researchers identified several possible contributing factors, including staffing shortages and interruptions to medical care, while noting that more data was needed to fully understand the causes. The important lesson isn't that evacuation was the wrong decision. It's that "How do we evacuate these patients?" was only one part of a much more complicated problem.
A better set of questions might have been: “What might be all the challenges of moving medically fragile patients during an evacuation?” Or “What might be all the experts we should have help develop our plan to ensure we’re not missing any pitfalls?”
This clear separation is an important distinction in formal Creative Problem Solving. Before jumping to "What should we do?", it is worth asking, "What might be all the problems we’re actually trying to solve, and whom do we need to help us think them through?"
Keep asking "What if?" after the obvious answers run out
Emergency managers were practically born asking one of the world's great creative-thinking questions: "What if?" What if the river rises another three feet? The bridge fails? The hospital loses power? The neighboring jurisdiction is dealing with its own emergency and cannot provide the mutual aid we normally rely on?
Good. Now keep going.
The first concerns we generate are usually the things we already know to worry about. They're often important and accurate. Yet they’re often not the only things worth exploring.
During planning, this is where deliberate divergence earns its keep. Stretch the assumptions before reality does it for you. Then converge using probability, consequence, resources, and experience. If we evaluate every possibility at the instant somebody voices it, unusual but important scenarios have a hard time surviving the meeting. Diverge exhaustively first, then converge to the potential scenarios worth throwing time, budget, and thinking at.
Plan for more than one future
Futuring and Emergency Management are natural partners because the future stubbornly refuses to arrive in only one version.
Instead of asking only, "What will happen?" ask, "What are several plausible things that could happen, and how would our strategies perform in each?"
Include the expected event, a significantly worse event, and at least one version that initially makes people uncomfortable because it violates a familiar assumption.
Emergency plans have dogmas, assumptions, bias, and blind spots just like the humans who build them do: the road will remain open, mutual aid will arrive, the phones will work, people will follow instructions, the Emergency Operations Center will be usable.
What if they aren't? That's not pessimism. That's preparation.
CASE EXAMPLE | HURRICANE HARVEY - WHEN THE PUBLIC BECAME PART OF THE INFORMATION SYSTEM
During Hurricane Harvey, members of the public used social media to report locations of people needing rescue, share changing conditions, and coordinate volunteers and resources. FEMA later identified the changing communications environment as an important lesson from the response. The official systems still mattered, but responders also had to recognize and use an emergent source for situational awareness that traditional plans had not fully anticipated.
Exercises are one of the best places to build this capability because that's where we can afford to be surprised, make mistakes, and discover what we didn't know we didn't know.
We exercise to determine whether people can execute the plan, and we should. We can also test whether people can think beyond it.
Introduce ambiguity. Remove an assumed resource. Change the problem halfway through. Give two groups the same situation and ask them to develop meaningfully different response strategies. Ask a team to identify assumptions underlying its response and then deliberately remove several.
Afterward, don't stop at "Did the plan work?" Ask how the team thought. Where did we narrow too quickly? Which assumptions went unchallenged? Whose perspective was missing? When did hierarchy help, and when did it suppress useful thinking or information? Where might ego or confirmation bias have tripped us up?
Now the exercise is doing more than testing the plan. It is developing cognitive adaptability.
Your most important resilience investment may be better thinkers
Emergency Management needs plans, procedures, systems, technology, and resources. Underneath all of them are people who will eventually encounter something nobody predicted perfectly.
When that happens, the beautifully formatted, tabulated binder isn't going to creatively solve the problem. The people will.
So perhaps our preparedness question needs to expand beyond whether we have a good plan. Have we developed people who can think well together when the plan stops working?
That means people who remain curious under pressure, distinguish facts from assumptions, recognize when the team may be solving the wrong problem, generate multiple alternatives before becoming attached to one, listen to the odd perspective, and challenge the sacred "this is how we've always done it" assumption.
It also means knowing when to stop diverging, converge decisively, and act. And afterward, being humble enough to learn.
Preparing for the disaster we can't predict
The work of Emergency Management is ultimately about protecting people, property, and the environment when ordinary systems are under extraordinary stress.
We'll keep improving our models. We'll gather better data. We'll build better plans. We'll use increasingly sophisticated technology. AI will almost certainly help us anticipate, model, and manage emergencies in ways we're only beginning to understand.
Do all of that. But never confuse a better prediction with certainty.
There will be another storm that behaves strangely, another fire that jumps the line, another infrastructure failure that cascades somewhere we didn't expect, another human being who doesn't do what we thought they would, and another nefarious actor who finds the vulnerability we overlooked.
We cannot write a plan for every future. We can develop people who are prepared to think when the future surprises us.
Perhaps that's one of the greatest responsibilities of Emergency Management: preparing communities for the disasters we can foresee while building the human capacity to respond wisely, creatively, and courageously to the ones we can't.
Because someday, somewhere, the radios won't work, a road will be gone, a resource won't arrive, people will be frightened, and the plan will be incomplete. A group of human beings will look at one another and ask: "Well...now what?"
We can't know what their answer will need to be.
But we can make damn sure we've prepared them to find it.
Long time lurker and a new collegiate EM. My department is only a few years old (only created due to covid), we don’t even have a budget ie no money. Because we are starting from scratch, we really need to find grant money for basic equipment, especially a EOC.
The issue I’m running into right now is most federal grants are for state and local EM departments but despite being a state university, we don’t qualify. I’ve thought about trying to piggyback off of local grants with the county but afraid that’s not gonna be taken well.
My question is, where are yall getting your money for either new initiatives or equipment? Any suggestions?
We literally only have 1 radio so we are not doing great.
First off I'm in Canada so while the ICS system is 99% the same, there are some differences. I know there are a few paid versions of ICS software out there but they are all on a yearly subscription and not a cheap. We are a small municipality and can't afford this. Problem is we've had two incidents this year. We've manage pretty well with just using paper but it's a lot of strain on our DOCL and Finance team.
I'm just wondering if anyone knows of any open source ICS software out there? If not would there be some interest in doing something like this? While I used to be a vb6 and vb.net programer, I'm not much on php type web apps. I can vibe code with the best of them though :)
The basics matter, like a phone system that is user-friendly, or reliable printers, or easy screen-sharing during meetings. What else have you come across that you'd love to use? I've heard a lot of talk about integrating AI, which to me makes sense as a data aggregate or amalgamation, but I don't see a world where that replaces the human art of EM. What AI or other software products are you a fan of?
I'm asking very broadly because I think there's a lot of room to modernize and streamline decision-making, but I worry that too many people are caught up in the idea of AI fixing funding and training/experience gaps. So I'm curious what people in the real world are experiencing.
Need help from the community. We recently had a flood impact our home. We do have flood insurance through NFIP. We had an independent contractor come to our home, representing an insurance provider, which serves as the "front man" to the policy.
I was just sent two documents by the contractor:
Final Flood Draft - the details of your estimate. This will specifically let you know what is being replaced for this flood, and all the particulars of how the final total were calculated (such as taking out your deductible)
Proof of Loss.
The total dollar amount stated in the final flood draft doesn't even cover the cost of the clean up. Our HVAC system was ruined and the only thing in the draft is a ~$200 technician visit.
What am I missing? Is this just an initial reimbursement and the desk adjuster will look at the actual cost and we will get a check for the difference?
There are a number of different points made in the post, but the densest section offered below:
"Whether or not a challenge fits neatly into a civil defense or emergency services way of thinking should not preclude emergency management’s involvement in problem solving. If it threatens people, strains essential systems, or creates risks and coordination demands that require an integrated community or organizational response, emergency managers need to be at the table."
Does anyone have experience with the certification program offered by AAEM such as the Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, and Master Level Emergency Manager certifications? I don't work for a government (ESF non-profit work) so I'm not eligible for Master level or for the CLEM certifications. Have these certifications advanced your career?
I am considering getting my AEM or CEM. I have gotten some mixed reviews whether this accreditation is worth it. Most people have said the CEM/AEM is really for those who don’t have a BS in Emergency Management (I received mine in July).
If you have either accreditation;
Have you found the accreditation useful?
What did you find the most useful method of studying
Hi everyone, I'm preparing to take the CBCP exam (self-study) and was wondering if anyone could share an example of the types of questions that are asked. I can't seem to find any free, available practice tests online.
County EM coordinator, been running HSEEP exercises for 11 years, MSEL, controllers, evaluators, hotwash, AAR/IP all of it.
Last month IT ran their annual cyber tabletop and invited me to observe. 2 hours of the IT director reading a scenario off a slide and asking the room what they’d do. No injects that changed anything, nothing got activated, and the after action was an email saying good discussion everyone. Meanwhile the county two over from us lost CAD and payroll for 3 weeks to ransomware.
I want to pitch a cyber functional exercise for spring where we stand up the EOC and departments have to keep services running on paper. Problem is I don’t have the cyber background to write a believable MSEL and IT doesn’t have the exercise design side.
What I hve looked at so far:
•CISA CTEP cyber packages. Closest to what I know but static, the scenario doesnt move no matter what players decide.
•Reflex Security. Someone demoed it at our state EM conference, it builds the scenario from your own org info, AI plays the attacker, press and vendors, and the injects change based on the calls people make. Puts out the AAR at the end too. Not sure yet how that sits with HSEEP evaluation.
•Exigence. A hospital EM friend uses it, but I think it’s more for running the real event than practicing it.
•BreachRx. Came up in a CISA webinar, haven’t dug into it.
•Hiring a contractor to write a custom MSEL, which is what we’d normally do for a full-scale.
Anyone co run a cyber exercise with their IT side? Mostly curious how you handled evaluation.
Hey folks. I started a Substack with a few fellow emergency managers that like to write where we post our unfinished thoughts, opinions, and battle stories about EM. We're looking for some more contributors. If you're interested, let me know! We currently have about 74 subscribers.
EDIT: If anyone has any topics they want to see as well, drop them here!
