That’s something that’s going to have to be well communicated. Working on how … you make those decisions and understanding what the actual impacts are going to be is huge because it’s going to be such a large scale. It’s unlikely people are going to be able to request and get generators across an entire country to deal with something like this. So there are some things that we can do about it. In many cases, industry has got to do what it can to protect itself.

Right now I think the biggest thing is to understand what the hazards are; who the forecasters are, which is the space weather prediction center; signing up and getting their alerts; learning what the [threat] scales mean; having a better understanding of what the consequences are based upon what industry will do to protect itself; and what some of the possible concerns can be if they are unable to protect themselves and they suffer damages.

 

With the tough budget times that everyone is facing, a number of federal, state, and local and private-sector emergency management programs are having to cut back in a number of areas. What guidance do you have for them in dealing with and preparing for what are austere times while threats and emergencies will always be there?

Take the approach that if every jurisdiction is trying to do everything that it can to deal with the threats that they face by themselves, there’s not enough resources, time, or money to do it. If nothing else, [this] should force us more and more into realization that the interdependencies at local, state, and federal levels are really built upon our ability to move resources from the non-impacted areas to the areas of impact.

Mutual aid – things like the state emergency management assistance compacts – are important for leveraging not only the government resources but also for working with volunteers in private sector so we’re not duplicating what somebody else is already doing or can do better than us, so we can focus our limited resources on the more key assets.

This kind of goes back to this situation you’re dealing with [in] state and local budgets. You’re dealing with fewer staff. The idea that I could tap into a network of fellow emergency managers across the country to come help staff the EOCs [emergency operations centers] and to bring needed personnel in gives me tremendous reachback. Even in what people might consider flush economic times, I never knew too many jurisdictions that had enough staff to run their EOCs 24 hours anyway.

So one of the things we learned early on was the ability to have mutual aid and bring folks in. Then people say, “Well, what do the folks do back home when mutual aid is taking away from their communities?” and I’m going, “Yeah, but they’re getting the best training they’ll ever get and they’re going to learn lessons that they’re going to apply back in their communities.”

So, I think it really comes back and stresses the need for sharing resources, capabilities, and using mutual aid to leverage the workforce across the country versus limiting ourselves to the geographic or political subdivisions we’re working in going, “I gotta do all this myself.”

You know, when I started out in emergency management, my total budget was my salary and about $300 – and that was in 1987. So I had to figure out how to basically get into other people’s programs and resources that could support emergency management because it was in their best interest.That meant I had to add value to what they were doing to get them to commit people and resources to build a program. And that’s what I did when I was in the county. It’s what I did when I got to the state of Florida. …

Everybody always thinks Florida has a lot of resources because of Hurricane Andrew and other things. They forget Florida routinely has one of the lowest-ranked per capita spending on state government in any state. We didn’t have a lot of resources but we had been forced into doing things differently after Hurricane Andrew. We couldn’t respond to big disasters agency by agency. We had to work as a team and really focus on what agencies are best at something and then rather than having everybody else kind of duplicating it, put all our emphasis on that one program to support the rest of the team.

So as an example, rather than every agency in Florida trying to figure out where they’re going to get fuel in a disaster and having all those contracts and all the duplications of resources, we made a strategic decision that the agency that was in charge of energy, which is our Department of Environmental Protection, would be responsible for all the fuel. That meant other agencies had to give up some of their absolute control that they wanted to have, but it reduced our total cost and improved our efficiency so that rather than all of us competing for fuel, we had one part of the team focused on that.