In October of 2022, audit reports were released for the emergency management offices for the two largest cities in the US – interestingly enough conducted by controller’s offices. New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office conducted an audit of NYC Emergency Management, while City of Los Angeles Controller Ron Galperin’s office conducted an audit of … Continue reading Big City Emergency Management Audits
I’ve lately seen some bad takes on data analytics in emergency management. For those not completely familiar, data analytics is a broad-based term applied to all manner of data organization, manipulation, and modeling to bring out the most valuable perspectives, insights, and conclusions which can better inform decision-making. Obviously, this can be something quite useful … Continue reading Metrics and Data Analytics in Emergency Management
A disaster doesn’t end when the lights and sirens go away. Communities are left dealing with clean up and rebuilding for weeks, months, or even years. But we aren’t yet talking about recovery. We are still talking about addressing early impacts of a disaster that have real implications on people’s lives and stability immediately following … Continue reading The Multi-Agency Resource Center
Increasingly, government agencies and departments are identifying the benefits of establishing and activating departmental operations centers (DOCs) to help manage their responses to incidents. At the Vermont Vigilant Guard 2016 exercise, which concluded last week, I had some opportunity to discuss the benefits of DOCs, particularly with an agency who used theirs for the first … Continue reading Using Departmental Operations Centers for Incident Management Success
Emergency management, by nature, is at the nexus of a number of other practices and professions, focusing them on solving the problems of emergencies and disasters. It’s like a Venn diagram, with many entities, including emergency management, having some overlapping interests and responsibilities, but each of them having an overlap in the center of the … Continue reading Emergency Management: Coordinating a System of Systems
I just read an article discussing some high-level meetings between the nations of Turkey and Azerbaijan in regard to emergency management. While the article was short, it seemed to indicate hope in further discussions and cooperation between the two nations. Admittedly, I didn’t know precisely where Azerbaijan is relative to Turkey so I looked up the region … Continue reading International Cooperation in Emergency Management
Throughout all professions and specialties within the broad category of public safety and emergency services, we go through a lot of training. Training within these various professions has become a profession itself, with many individuals, myself included, spending much of their career as trainers. Through the vast quantity and variety of training we’ve received, we … Continue reading Scenario-based Learning in Emergency Services – Success, how to, and the need for more!
This morning I received my semi-regular e-mail update from the Lessons Learned Information Sharing (LLIS) folks at the US Department of Homeland Security. If you are in the EM/HS field and are not on LLIS, I strongly encourage you to do so. It’s a great community of practice, facilitating the sharing of lessons learned and … Continue reading Business Civic Leadership Center and Emergency Management
In reference to an MSNBC article titled “Homeland Security Fusion Centers Called Useless“… This was a pretty critical article on the utility and outputs of fusion centers. Fusion centers have been highly funded by the federal government over the past decade as a means of pulling together local, state, and federal law enforcement officials into … Continue reading Fusion Centers & The Art of Intel
The International Public Safety Association (IPSA) is holding their annual conference on May 1 and 2 in beautiful Mesa, Arizona. With the understanding that large incidents and disasters require a team effort, the IPSA brings together all public safety professionals – law enforcement, fire service, EMS, telecommunications, emergency management, public health, and others – to … Continue reading IPSA 2023 Conference
The Contrarian Emergency Manager 