In late May, FEMA/DHS released an updated version of Comprehensive Preparedness Guide (CPG) 201. For those not familiar, CPG 201 is designed to guide communities and organizations through the process of the Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA). This is the third edition of a document that was originally released in April 2012. … Continue reading An Updated Comprehensive Preparedness Guide 201 (THIRA/SPR)
Return on investment (ROI) is generally defined as a measurement of performance to evaluate the value of investments of time, money, and effort. Many aspects of preparedness in emergency management offer challenges when trying to gauge return on investment. Sure, it’s easy to identify that m number of classes were conducted and n number of … Continue reading Measuring Return on Investment Through Key Performance Indicators
It seems an annual tradition for me to be reviewing the National Preparedness Report. I’ve endeavored to provide constructive criticism of these documents, which are compilations of data from state and federal agencies, national-level responses, and other sources. This year’s National Preparedness Report emphasizes that it is based on data from the 2019 calendar year. … Continue reading FEMA’s 2020 National Preparedness Report – A Review
About a year ago, FEMA distributed a draft revision of Community Preparedness Guide 101: Developing and Maintaining Emergency Operations Plans (CPG 101). Since then we hadn’t heard much about the update progress, until yesterday. This latest draft, including in formation on how you can provide feedback, can be found here. This latest draft incorporates some … Continue reading A New CPG 101 Draft
We still aren’t getting preparedness right. It’s not being measured properly, funded properly, or implemented properly. What do we need to do?
Earlier today FEMA dropped the latest version of the Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program (HSEEP) doctrine. Doing a quick comparison between this new version and the previous (2013) version, I’ve identified the following significant changes: They replaced the ‘Elected and Appointed Officials’ mentions within the document with ‘Senior Leaders’. This makes sense, since often … Continue reading NEW: 2020 HSEEP Revision
I hope everyone is settling into the new year nicely. One of the things I started off this year doing was going through CPG 101 and providing input to FEMA for the update of this foundational document. (note: if you haven’t yet, get your comments in now as the deadline is soon approaching!) CPG 101, … Continue reading Thoughts on How to Improve the Planning Standard
Earlier this year, FEMA released guidance on the Community Lifelines. I wrote a piece in the spring about integrating the concept into our preparedness and response activities. Last month, FEMA issued updated guidance for Community Lifeline Implementation through Toolkit 2.0. In this update, FEMA cites some lessons learned in actually applying the Lifeline concept in … Continue reading An Updated Community Lifelines Toolkit and Relationships to Incident Management
A few days ago, Homeland Security Today posted an article titled FEMA Creates Pilot Program for Long-term Emergency Management. It seemed intriguing, so I took a look. The article is pretty much verbatim (no fault of HS Today) from the press release posted by FEMA of the same title (linked to in the article). Needless … Continue reading A FEMA Pilot Program? Maybe?
The 2018 National Preparedness Report was released last week. For the past few years, I’ve provided my own critical review of these annual reports (see 2017’s report here). For those not familiar with the National Preparedness Report (NPR), it is mandated by the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (PKEMRA). The information is compiled by FEMA … Continue reading Reviewing The 2018 National Preparedness Report
