Updating Emergency Management
By Albert B. Kelly
It’s one of those bureaucracies you hope you never have to engage with and while this might be said of any bureaucracy, it is particularly true of emergency management. I say that because if you’re engaging with the whole emergency management ecosystem, you’re either planning for an incident, in the midst of an incident, or trying to put the pieces back together after an incident.
Yet, I can think of no other bureaucratic ecosystem that is worthy of our attention as we end 2021 and start 2022 then emergency management and specifically the Office of Emergency Management or OEM. This has been increasingly on my mind, prompted by the tornados that wiped out swathes of Kentucky along with wildfires out west, heat waves and then weird snow storms in the Pacific Northwest, snow in Hawaii, 500-year flooding in North Jersey, and other bizarre weather in places and at times it simply ought not to be.
With climate change and global warming now our new normal, regardless of whether it is permanent or cyclical as the climate-deniers like say, the fact remains that we are seeing extremes that are having devastating impacts on families and communities throughout our region and the country. This vulnerability will continue to be the case and yet I suspect that at least on the local level, we are unprepared or under-prepared for this future we’re about to experience.
That is not meant as a criticism to anyone in the field because we have been fortunate to have some dedicated and capable people working in the emergency management ecosystem at the County level as well as the State level over the years. My concern is more at the municipal level. Down at street level, we tend to treat OEM functions as a part-time add-on thing.
This is understandable because you can easily go years without a major “all-hands-on-deck” event or incident and over time OEM tends to be moved toward the back burner. We might have been able to get away with this back-burner approach in years past, but I do not think we will have that luxury in the future.
What is now occurring in our climate and in our weather will test our readiness, capabilities, and our follow-through. According to research by PEW, from 2005 to 2019, the federal government overall spent $460 billion on disaster assistance while FEMA’s public assistance increased by 23% when comparing the 2000 to 2009 decade against the 2010 to 2019 decade.
What that means to me is that we can expect some type of natural disaster to impact us in the not-too-distant future. Accordingly, it may be time to convene some type of OEM summit, perhaps on a county-by-county basis, in order to get a handle on where things stand in each municipality and county. This is particularly needful for smaller communities because we’re often guilty of stitching together a plan so we can say we have one, but that’s about as far as it goes.
If the substance ever really hit the fan, it is not at all clear how well we would be served by our respective plans and how they would hold up as working documents in the middle of a crisis. This does not even begin to touch on what is involved with applying for funds and the documentation that is involved with disaster monies on the back side of an event. The disaster relief bureaucracy is by no means easy or simple and yet it is often the deciding factor in recovery at all levels of government, but we do not give it due attention.
It also occurs to me that it may be time to consider building more flexibility into certain state and federal programs to allow communities to allocate funds to OEM-related tasks and activities as a preparedness measure. This would allow smaller communities to focus in a serious way on emergency management instead of tacking it onto other functions and departments as an “add-on” which is often what happens these days.
Such an approach would enable smaller communities to pay consultant professionals, fund shared services agreements, or hire full-time dedicated OEM staff to conduct assessments and prepare plans that are actually community-specific and workable in the eye of the storm as opposed to having cut-and-paste templates that allow us to simply check off a box, but fail us when we need it most.