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
I recently finished reading Team of Teams by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The General tells of the new perspective and strategy he needed to employ to better manage the Joint Special Operations Task Force in the 2000s hunting down Al Qaeda insurgents. The Task Force was being out paced by a decentralized organization with all the … Continue reading A Re-Framing of Incident Management Structures
Yesterday FEMA’s National Integration Center distributed notice of a national engagement period on two new Emergency Operations Center (EOC) related documents: EOC References and Resources Tool and the EOC How-To Quick Reference Guide. This seems to be the initiation of an EOC Toolkit, which I conceptually think is a great idea. My first impression of … Continue reading EOC Toolkit: National Comment Period
Planning, training, and exercises, as the foundational activities of preparedness, shouldn’t be stopping because of the pandemic. Preparedness is an ongoing activity which needs to forge ahead with little disruption – and there is always plenty to do! What must we do, though, to accommodate necessary precautions in the age of the Pandemic? Let’s talk … Continue reading Preparedness in the Pandemic Age
