Every disaster I have worked or studied has two stories running at once: the damage, and the people who show up to help. Volunteers are not a nice extra in American emergency management. They are structural. But the help that shows up comes in two very different forms, and a [...]
Most of the emergency management I have seen done well in Georgia was not done in a big fusion center with a wall of monitors. It was done from one desk, often by somebody who was also the fire chief, the 911 director, or a deputy, working with almost no [...]
Every large emergency in the United States eventually comes down to the same question: who is in charge, and how do all these agencies work together? The National Incident Management System and the Incident Command System are the country’s answer. This guide explains what they are, how they scale from [...]
No department, no county, and no state owns enough resources to handle its worst day alone. That is not a weakness. It is the design assumption behind the entire American emergency services system. Mutual aid is the machinery that moves help from where it sits to where it is needed, [...]
Most people have seen an Emergency Operations Center on the news: a room full of screens, phones, and people in polos hunched over laptops. Far fewer people, including some who work in government, can explain what actually happens in that room. After twenty five years around emergency management and public [...]
Every disaster that does not happen is invisible. The house that did not flood because it was elevated, the family that walked out of a safe room after a tornado, the neighborhood that did not burn because someone cleared defensible space years earlier: none of these make the news. That [...]
When a disaster hits an American community, the money and help that arrive later depend heavily on paperwork that starts in the first hours. The disaster declaration process is not mysterious, but it is widely misunderstood, and the misunderstandings cost communities real recovery dollars. This guide walks through how the [...]
Most emergency operations plans die quietly on a shelf. They get written for a compliance deadline, approved by a board that never read past page three, and pulled out only when someone needs to prove the jurisdiction has one. After twenty-five years in this field, including writing a regional health [...]
Most emergency plans answer the question “how do we respond to the disaster?” Continuity of operations planning answers a harder one: “how do we keep doing our own jobs while the disaster is happening to us?” I have spent 25 years in emergency management, including years writing continuity-relevant plans for [...]
Most emergency management programs in small and mid-sized jurisdictions run on thin budgets, and the capability you wish you had usually gets built with grant money or not at all. I have spent twenty-five years in this field, and one of the most useful things I ever learned was how [...]
