Our vast array of emergency plans often call for staffing a slate of identified positions. Hopefully, those positions are at least defined in our plans with given roles and responsibilities, but that may not be enough. Largely, those emergency positions that are directly associated with a daily role are easily assigned (i.e. a highway engineer or a behavioral health clinician). Ideally, those associated with incident command system (ICS) or emergency operations center (EOC) positions should be easily assigned as well, though unless you have a designated incident management team (IMT) or EOC staff actually trained in their given emergency positions (very few jurisdictions have either), then it’s not as easily done.
Beyond those more technical positions, what of staff for your emergency call center, or the non-technical staff identified in your point of distribution (POD) plan, family assistance center (FAC) plan, join information center (JIC) plan, or others? It’s easy for us to say we need ‘reception’ staff and even provide a job aid to outline general responsibilities, but is that enough? Do we need to include a listing of ideal knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) that staff should have?
How do the logistics of it all work? Are you able to provide all the necessary equipment (such as a laptop) or do staff need to bring theirs? Do you know how you will recruit for these positions? It may be simple if you draw staff from within your agency, but if you need additional, that can complicate matters. Do you need to work with a human resources (HR) department? Are there unions involved? Do immediate supervisors have any say? What of their regular jobs? (Do partner agencies have continuity plans they can activate to support this?) Are volunteers appropriate to support the staffing need? Can people be trained ahead of time? Will just in time training be adequate? (If so, we need to develop that NOW) Have you considered mutual aid? Staffing agencies? Contracted services? Are there liability concerns? Is your information technology (IT) department able to support the operation? Can they accommodate agency-owned devices as well as those brought in by others? Can ‘outsiders’ access your network, applications, and printers?
The need this points to for agencies with significant emergency functions is a surge or emergency staffing plan. While a model exists in public health for such a plan, these are rarely seen in the wild. Development of such a plan, even with the use of a template, should be guided by the same CPG 101 planning process we use for all other emergency planning projects, starting with assembling a planning team. As eluded to in the previous paragraph, this should involve administrative agencies that would be needed to support implementation, such as HR, IT, and procurement, as well as your office of emergency management (if it’s an agency other than the OEM developing the plan). I’d also suggest that, just like any other emergency plan, the surge staffing plan should be exercised. Again, public health seems to be ones leading this effort through current CDC exercise requirements (see page 10).
To be clear, though, just because public health is leading the charge on this, doesn’t mean that other agencies that could experience surge staffing needs shouldn’t be doing this. This includes offices of emergency management. Even though OEMs have great networks and are typically the keepers of mutual aid plans, doesn’t mean that many of the administrative and support matters don’t need to be addressed. I’d also suggest that public works and highway departments could use such a plan, as could social services agencies.
While tools like hardware, software, and AI might be able to act as a force multiplier and help us do certain work more effectively, our jobs, especially during disasters, still require people to make it happen.
© 2026 Tim Riecker, CEDP
The Contrarian Emergency Manager 