*Local Emergency Management Perspectives on Catastrophe Readiness and
Response*

Panelists: Marg Verbeek, Mike Selves, Matthew McCracken

**Dr. Anthony Brown**

Welcome. My name is Tony Brown. I'm the director of the graduate program
in fire and emergency management at Oklahoma State University and I'll
serve as moderator of our first panel this morning.

Former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill once said that all politics in
the United States is local, and in many respects, emergency management
in the United States is local. That's where it happens---at the local
level and local jurisdictions.

In his remarks in our opening session on Tuesday morning, the deputy
undersecretary for preparedness reminded us that every disaster or
emergency event is first and foremost a local event. Al Fluman, acting
director of the NIMS Integration Center, in his breakout session
yesterday again reminded us that all disasters are local.

A theme running through many of our sessions during the conference this
year is the critical role played by local government and local emergency
management personnel in the U.S. emergency management system.

The title of our panel this morning is Local Emergency Management
Perspectives on Catastrophe Readiness and Response, and we're very
fortunate to have with us this morning three professional emergency
managers who are highly qualified to address the panel topic.

I will introduce the panelists in the order they will be doing their
presentations. It's the same order you find in your program. They will
be making brief comments and we are allowing time for questions from the
audience, so as you listen, you may be thinking of what questions you
would like to pose at the end of the presentations. We'll hold the
questions until all panelists have had the opportunity to make their
comments.

**Marg Verbeek**

Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here, and thank you to Wayne and
your organizational team for including us practitioners here at the
Higher Ed conference.

As Tony mentioned, I'm from Canada; I'm an emergency manager working in
local government and have been a member of IAEM for several years. I
won't talk about the CEM program---and that may be some of your
questions---but certainly I'm very happy to talk about it off-line.

This morning, Local Emergency Management Perspectives on Catastrophic
Readiness and Response. What kind of emergencies do we think we will be
facing? I think the new normal certainly would be global warming, the
interconnectivity, aging infrastructure, terrorism---we know a little
bit more about that this morning, and thank goodness we have some bad
people gone, pandemics, and so forth. We also want to think about what
kind of trends have been out there in emergencies---the types of things
that have been occurring, not only in North America, but all around the
world. They are, may I suggest to you, food for thought---more frequent,
bigger, international in scope, complex; and the reality is an event in
your community, in your country will be on the news within minutes. We
no longer have the ability to do as much information collecting in those
first few minutes, hours, and so we're concerned about the timeliness.
Right away, of course, we will have the media on-site, and in many
cases, wanting information before we've had an opportunity to get a feel
from the field.

In our local communities, we have emergency operation centers, and I
will suggest to you---this was given to me from one of my provincial
colleagues many, many years ago. We read this about uncomfortable
officials meeting in the unaccustomed surroundings, playing unfamiliar
roles, making unpopular decisions, based on inadequate information and
insufficient time. This is where I think we were many, many years ago.
The profession has grown, our situations have revolved, and hopefully,
in your jurisdictions, people are much better and well-positioned to
respond to the most and ever-increasingly complex emergencies.

What type of predictable challenges do we think we will have at our next
crisis? While I think there is a whole cadre out there as practitioners
that come to mind, quite often we think we know who's in charge. Many
times---and I have been in situations in my own country where we didn't
really know who was in charge. In fact, we had more than one person who
thought they were in charge. We're concerned about making sure we have
effective leadership and having our leadership adequately trained and
able to excel during any type of crisis or major event.

Managing the information flow is a big issue, especially with the scale
and magnitude of large events, not easy to navigate through. Having one
command structure in place and everybody, in terms of all the broader
public safety, public service, all levels of agencies and responders
being able to work within one structure; and last, but not least, I
think we understand that all tragedies relative to emergencies not being
executed very well in terms of the response and the recovery is
certainly a failure of leadership and certainly communications.

Some of the complex issues I think continue to be trying to get the
right kind of interagency operability, both on the communication voice
radio side and also on the data side, and what does that mean? I know in
my community we have a very large five-site multi-agency interagency
voice radio communication 800-meg system. I don't think it's good
enough. We realized during a catastrophic event, we'll need to implement
some level of better communications including satellite communications.

Yesterday, you heard a little bit about the EMAC process, and I'm
pleased to hear how well they're addressing issues relative to
credentialing. Managing the media force is never an easy challenge, and
certainly, but not least, I added in one point for me that comes to mind
is if somebody in your organization has been allegedly charged with some
wrongdoing, how will you be able to deal with that in a crisis is going
to determine how well you will be able to cope during a big emergency.

Some of the observations for Katrina---again, I talked about having
effective leadership. In the business we do, one of the critical
factors, aside from the technical task, is really building good and
solid pre-established strategic relations. So as part of that university
curriculum, yesterday in Dr. Jennifer Wilson's session, she talked about
strategic planning and many of the professors in there I know talked
about teaching students strategic skills---I can't reinforce it enough.
We, of course, are interested in the business of all-hazard planning and
we've learned from Katrina to plan and to ask for the worst-case
scenarios---however, you could define them for your own jurisdiction.

In terms of business continuity, having the ability to look right across
your agency, your organization, and so forth, and then identifying what
is your critical business areas and ensuring that you've done effective
mitigation for which you cannot substitute an emergency resumption plan.

There is a little picture in the bottom there---it says, Toronto Star.
In Canada, it talks a little bit about what we went through in terms of
SARS, and that taught us a lot about managing the media. A couple of
points in dealing with the media, particularly around this crisis---one
really hit home around when you have insufficient information, don't put
out front your core leaders---put out your public information officer
and wait until you have adequate information. We know what the media is
obsessed with: numbers, numbers, numbers, as you can read for yourself.

Yes, that does say, "Emergency department is closed until further
notice"---not a situation we ever want to find ourselves in. I've just
put up a few bullet points there for your own consideration around some
of my own observations as we navigate through the next potential, we
know pandemic that it will happen---we just don't know what time it is
when it will occur.

Some of the challenges we have as an organization, as professional
emergency managers, obviously having sufficient influence and funding in
our programs is very universal. Receiving appropriate direction from our
government, and I'm not just talking about one level in particular.
Recognizing the extent which the political environment is a big part of
the landscape and the environment in which we work in, and of course,
recognizing that there has to be much more extensive dialogue in
education between all levels of government.

Other type of events we think are critical for us in the work that we
do: I talked a minute ago about standardized incident command system,
but trying to maintain critical functions and recognizing during an
actual event, we will deal as a small profession with a whole mental
acuity of tired staff. People in there working during a big disaster,
working for very long and extensive periods of time. We do have, the
world over, I think, a lack of full-time professionals, we have people
who within their organization are in the bowels of their systems, and
are not working at a full-time capacity, which I think is less than
adequate, we have a lack of educated professionals in research in
Canada, we have one school---and I'm happy John Lindsay is here---we
have one school to go and get an undergraduate degree that's above the
extend, I'm very pleased to say, in the province of Ontario, several
college programs are coming online, and I know I've met somebody from
George Brown and kudos to you. We still look at it as a relatively new
profession and some of the growing pains that are associated with it,
and of course, we struggle with having good certification at IAEM, but
making that CEM program internationally recognized.

Some of the other faces of change and challenge we've had: a minute ago
I mentioned SARS. We learned, having antiquated computer systems in our
disease surveillance system really hung us out to dry. The bottom bullet
there for you on recording decisions was something we learned as
practitioners that we want to build back in our systems for improvement,
and that was around the rationale for decision making during crisis or
crisis management or in the event of a major emergency. My colleague
from London, England, who was involved with the reconnaissance of the
London bombings was very happy to help me come to the conclusions that
you might as well work back from an inquest.

As practitioner, what kind of roles do we really play as emergency
managers, and may I suggest to you that we are just not the tactical
experts; in fact, I've really put that to the bottom. I see us as
facilitators, mediators, we are advocates of the profession,
visionaries, project managers. In many communities, not only are we the
emergency manager, we may be the 911 PSAP administrator, we may have a
whole other cadre, we may be the business continuity professional, and
so forth. Indeed, we are seen to be professional advisors, leaders, and
so forth.

But what are the skills I think we need? The top one you can see there
that I have bulleted for you---we can teach emergency managers all of
those technical kind of skills and problem-solving and all the rest, but
may I suggest that in this profession, I traditionally only hire around
organizational and political acuity---the rest we can teach people. If
we hire people in these roles---particularly in management and
leadership jobs in emergency management---who are not organizationally
or politically sensitive, they will hang themselves and potentially us
out to dry. That is really the critical piece, I think, for us.

Just as I close here, a couple of academic considerations I put out in
terms of food for thought for you. Some of the programs I know we have
across our country are actually co-op programs; it's more like a 4- or
5-year opportunity for students to come in at the degree level and have
4- or 5-month work terms each and every year, and it may be a way we can
work better with academics in the profession to get people hands-on job
training and pay them as they go to school and make them more
well-rounded as they enter the profession.

I also think we need to upgrade the amount of education---particularly
in Canada and other parts of the world where it has been lagging. We
have a serious problem I know in our own country, and I think that
somehow we need to design courses or programs for practitioners. Some of
the practitioners have been involved in extensive training and it's been
hard hitting them over the head and saying, your training is not
necessarily education; there is a very real difference there for
practitioners truly to understand the benefits of advanced and higher
education.

Last, but not least, I think one of the areas I hope to work on in my
career is to somehow try and interest and bring more dialogue with
schools of planning, both in the United States and Canada. We're not
doing effective mitigation and we need to train our land use planners
what is mitigation and work for better areas of collaboration. It's many
ways the same skill-set and I think that will take us better down the
road to build better cities and better environments.

Thank you. I'll turn it over to Mike Selves.

**Mike Selves**

Good morning. I don't normally sound like this---I've contracted a cold
and it's affecting my voice. The folks back home would say that's
probably a good thing---you should be relieved that I am not able to
talk as long as I normally do.

When we think about catastrophes I'm reminded of a small western town
many, many years ago---right before the turn of the century and all the
folks are in the saloon and as they're sitting there having a drink or
playing cards or whatever a man comes into the saloon all excited and he
says, "Oh my God, take cover, Big Bad Bart's coming!" So everybody kind
of gets under the table and moves out of the way, and pretty soon, into
town rides this huge guy, all dressed in black, big black horse. He ties
his horse to the post and hits the horse in the head and the horse falls
down, just to keep him from running away. He comes into the saloon and
both of the saloon doors break off as he comes. He goes up to the bar,
then he slams his fist on the bar and he said, "Barkeep, give me a
whiskey!" The barkeep hands him up a bottle of whiskey and he breaks off
the head of it and drinks it and spits out the glass.

The barkeep, in order to kind of keep everything quiet, says, "Sir,
would you like another?" And he looked at the bartender and he said,
"No, gotta go---Big Bad Bart is coming."

That's kind of how we are with catastrophes. I think the folks in the
Gulf Coast in 2004 thought they had seen Big Bad Bart when they had five
hurricanes hit the State of Florida, all within the course of a month or
so; but obviously, Katrina turned out to be Big Bad Bart. I think that's
one of the things we need to keep in mind when we're talking about a
catastrophe. We always think we've seen the worst, and we may very well
not have. I think that's an important thing.

From the point of view of the locals, I know it's often said and I've
heard over and over again phrases like, it's where the rubber hits the
road, all disasters are local, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I would
hope, and I would like to think, that verbiage that we hear is in fact
translated into actions and into programs and into policies that allow
us at the local level to deal with Big Bad Bart with catastrophic
events. But unfortunately, what I've been hearing as a result of some of
the Katrina event, the catastrophic event, are rumblings that well, you
know, these are events that overwhelm local government, that make them
incapable of doing their jobs, and therefore---the implicit therefore is
somebody is going to have to do it for them. I would suggest to you that
from our viewpoint, that is something we ought to look at and really
think about and try to solve without this implicit, we will have to do
it for you.

There are some very good reasons---legal, constitutional, and
ethical---that the folks who are put in charge by the people of their
jurisdiction remain in charge. They are the people who were elected by
the folks in their jurisdictions to take care of them, to act for them.
What happens in disasters and especially in catastrophes is we have to
take extraordinary measures, we have to infringe upon the rights of the
citizens in many cases, we have to impose restrictions on the freedoms
of the people in the local jurisdictions. I submit to you that can only
have been done or should only be done by those people that the people
elected themselves to govern them.

So, what is the implication for emergency management and particularly
for emergency management professors and academicians? I would suggest to
you that it is as Marg pointed out---that we need more education and you
need to prepare your students to be broader thinkers, to think on
political, economic, social, ethical, and various other kinds of plains
so they are able to deal with these kinds of issues. Emergency
management is not the coordination of emergency response---it is that,
but it's more than that. We need professionals in emergency management
who have the capability to look at political issues, economic issues,
and so on, and be able to plan for and think about and design structures
within our communities that allow us to do this.

I teach an on-line course for Park University at the Master's level. One
of the courses we teach is of course Principles or Introduction to
Emergency Management. The assignment we gave for a final assignment was
do a hazard and vulnerability analysis. Throughout the course of the
course, we talked about what are the elements of doing a vulnerability
analysis. At the end, there were probably half to a little more than
half who, while they did an excellent job of hazard identification and
analysis, didn't do such a good job on vulnerability analysis. They
didn't see the need for or didn't understand the breadth of what
vulnerability analysis is all about, which is what is the impact on the
community and not just individual citizens but on the community's
political structure, its economic structure, its future, and so on and
so forth. I think that's one thing.

The second thing---and Marg brought this up as well---has to do with
mitigation. We hear a lot about how as a result of Hurricane Katrina,
those of us at the local level now have not been spending any time
dealing with emergency management issues that we think are necessarily
important. We've been told by Congress and by the administration and
DHS, you have to write a mass evacuation plan. In fact, the States have
been told plans for the evacuations of the entire State.

In my State of Kansas, it wouldn't take much to evacuate the western
two-thirds of the State, but in our case, that's a little unrealistic.
We have done a vulnerability analysis, a hazard analysis, and we know
there's probably no realistic chance that there would be an event for
which it would be appropriate to have a mass evacuation of the entire
Kansas City metropolitan area, but we're required to do it anyway.

The second thing I think is we need to be careful and have people in the
field who can respond to and understand the knee-jerk reactions that
occur when we have a major catastrophic or even a disaster event in this
country and we're dealing with that right now. This is one of the most
critical times for emergency management that I can remember and I've
been involved in it for at least 18 years and aware of it for about 20
or so years before that. That's the second thing: the ability to operate
in a political environment and to respond to the natural political
inclinations for knee-jerk reactions after major catastrophes.

The third one I think is important as well because I recently had a
conversation---well, it was more like a debate---with a local news
personality. We were invited to appear before a political group and talk
about preparation for and response for after Hurricane Katrina. He was
just outraged that I would suggest that my community, which is
relatively affluent, with good transportation infrastructure, we have
highly professional police, fire, and EMS services; we have a very
well-structured government; there's a lot of citizen participation; and
so on and so forth. He was outraged I would suggest we were any better,
more resistant to the kind of disasters that occurred in New Orleans
than New Orleans was.

That brings up the third issue I would like to talk about, and that is,
one of the things we can do and should be doing and apparently have
ceased to do, to a certain extent, is to talk about mitigation. We used
to talk a lot about sustainable communities---remember that?
Disaster-resistant communities, communities that had some capability of
sustaining themselves, of being resistant to these kinds of events, and
we have moved away from that. I think in the academics arena, we still
do talk about mitigation a lot, but I think we need to emphasize the
idea that if we can make our community sustainable and
disaster-resistant day-to-day, day in and day out, then the effects of
the catastrophe will not be as great. We will not see the complete
breakdown of local structures that we saw in some areas of the Gulf
Coast during Katrina, and I think that's important.

My final message to you is as the people who are going to be training
and educating, I agree with Marg---what we need in this profession is
education. We'll provide the training; we'll provide the experience. You
provide educated, thinking, discerning people with a professional
attitude that we can take as practitioners and mold into good, solid
emergency managers for their communities.

The last thing I would say is that we would very much like to see this
kind of approach taken by you, and some of us are getting a little long
in the tooth and are not going to be around much longer. We have in IAEM
a very strong commitment to your students, through the IEMSA program, to
help you develop good solid practitioners who can think much more
broadly than people in my generation and others in this profession have
in the past. I think that's one of the lessons we can learn from
catastrophes---we have to stretch our minds, we have to be generalists.

Tony and I were talking. He said, "Well, our program is in the public
administration program." I said, "I've preached for years and years that
we're not emergency responders; we're public administrators who are
responsible for the operation of the public in crisis." As I tell my
commissioners, the job of the emergency management is to tell public
officials things they don't want to hear, to ask them to spend money
they don't have, preparing for something they don't believe will ever
happen. That's our job and it's your job to help us do that. Thank you
very much.

**Matthew McCracken**

Good morning once again. Mike and Marg have both done an excellent job
giving the local perspective, so I will just add a few points to that
and then we will turn it back over to Tony for some questions this
morning.

It's been said---I believe I heard it said yesterday---that the
emergency manager has to be a quick thinker. The emergency manager has
normally somewhere between 30 and 40 seconds to make a decision that
will be criticized by the public and by the media for the next 30 to 40
years. I don't know if you can instill that in people, but if you figure
out how to do it, you need to share that.

I heard one of my colleagues make the analogy some time ago that
emergency management could more often be referred to as the spare tire.
What is the first thing that happens if you're going along in your car
and you have a flat? Your heart begins to beat rather quickly---unless
you're Leon Shaifer and have a chauffeur---because you're not real sure
if that tire has any air in it. You have not spent adequate amount of
time ensuring that this now lifeline of yours will adequately produce
and be functional when you need it.

So you take your tire out of the trunk, you install that tire onto your
vehicle, and you begin to think to yourself, boy, I've got to spend more
time with that tire. This thing has really got my tail out of a pinch
here. I will change the air in it every six months. I will check on it
once a week. Every time I check the oil, I will open the trunk and beat
on my tire to make sure it has air in it. So you do like you do with all
of your New Year's resolutions---you promise yourself you will be more
attentive to your lifeline, and then three months goes by---probably
three days---and you don't have another flat, so you forget the promise
that you just made to your lifeline.

That's the way most local governments treat emergency management. When
the storm is brewing in the Gulf---I can tell you this because I'm on
the staffing pattern for the State of Alabama and I go to Baldwin
County, which is in Gulf Shores. I can tell you we're watching the GFS
models of a tropical depression about June 12 in the Gulf of Mexico
right now. When the storm is brewing, the local elected officials go to
their emergency manager like their spare tire. Are the plans ready? Do
we have everything we need to respond to protect our citizens? That
local emergency management is the person who is sitting there---I liked
the way Larry from Hillsboro County, Florida---one of his commissioners
asked him, said, "Are we prepared for a Katrina?" He said,
"Commissioner, we're as prepared as you've given me the funding to be."

I don't know how else to put it. the local perspective on catastrophe
response and readiness---the local emergency manager's office on average
will be one person, maybe two. My claim to fame is I was the first
emergency responder that the county had ever hired as an emergency
manager. Like Mike said, coordinating emergency response is not the only
aspect of emergency management, but it is a large aspect of it.

In the past 4 years, I've been able to oversee a \$750,000 emergency
operation center go up in a county with a population of 35,000 people.
Big accomplishment. Our staff has doubled. We went from a one-man
operation to a two-man operation.

Why do I bring these things up? Because you're educating people who will
be filling the shoes of Mike Selves when he gets ready to retire. He has
a larger staff than I do. I will move on one day. All across the country
there will be these openings in emergency management, and I think best
put by our State director Bruce Baughman---we have got to train our
public officials in such a fashion to where we don't tell them you can't
hire your brother-in-law as the emergency manager because historically,
that's what's happened. Or the guy who ran your campaign. But let's tell
them that if you hire this person, you have a limited amount of time to
have them trained up to a standard to where they have the qualifications
to be there to make sure the plans are done, that the communities can be
prepared. The funding aspect of it is very large and that Mike made
mention of you're asking them to fund something they don't think will
happen. Oh, it won't happen here.

Emergency management performance grants---and we've heard a lot about
them---was a program that was institutionalized to pay for 50 percent of
the emergency management programs at the State and local levels in
Alabama. On average, across the State, it covers about 29 percent of the
local office budgets.

I want to end up and leave you with this and tell you a story about when
I was hired and the mentality of our county commission; and the reason I
want to share this with you is once again, because we need to change
this mentality. Two county commissioners, two State emergency regional
coordinators, and our county engineer, sitting in the interview process.
They looked through our packets and everybody had a question to ask. So
it comes time for my now favorite county commissioner to ask his
question. He's an older gentleman; he got elected because he's a "good
ole boy."

He said, "Matt, say right out here at the intersection two major
highways intersect right here at the courthouse, there's a tanker truck
that turns over out here. Just old hazardous junk running everywhere.
Tell me, how are you going to handle that?" I said, "Well,
commissioners, I've never worked in emergency management, but what I do
know about it, I do know that it's not my job to handle that. My job as
an emergency manager is to work with all the local responders, to work
with all the local governments, to know their resources, to know when
something is going to go beyond their capacity, or to have the foresight
to anticipate when it will go beyond their capacity, and as they need
more resources, I'm the go-to guy. You tell me what you need and I'll
get it."

He kind of sat back in his chair and he thought, hmm. I knew right then
that wasn't the answers he was getting from some other folks. The
regional coordinator said, "Good answer."

The local emergency management is not there to take the place of the
fire department or the police department or the ambulance service or the
county commissioner. We are---I forget exactly the terminology that was
used yesterday in that session---the mediator, the facilitator that
tries to make sure everybody is headed down the right road.

Just in closing, I almost think that before you have a degree in
emergency management maybe you should have a degree in political science
because it is very political, from who gets the job to how much funding
we give those folks. Bottom line is everything revolves around how much
funding you have to do your job with.

So with that, thank you. We'll turn it back over to Tony for questions.

**QUESTIONS:**

**Bert Tussing, United States Army War College:** Question for Mr.
Selves: I would appreciate it, sir, if you could tell me what you mean
by catastrophe, making a distinction between a major disaster and a
catastrophe. As I think most of us know, this country responds
relatively routinely to presidentially-declared disasters 40 to 60 times
a year, but catastrophe I think is another tier we need to address that
may call for a new rule set in what you were talking about, so could you
help us there, please.

**Mike Selves:** Sure, and I agree with you totally that a catastrophe
such as Katrina certainly is beyond the normal rule-set. What I'm
concerned about and the purpose of my remarks was to point out that
while we may change the rule-set somewhat, there are still some very
basic constitutional, ethical, and political realities that we need to
bear in mind. Initially after Katrina I heard a lot of talk---and by the
way, I will point out to you I'm a 20-year retired Air Force officer, so
I understand the military as well---but I think there is a role for the
military to play, and immediately after Katrina, we heard a lot of stuff
about how giving operational control in many cases over catastrophic
events to the military and to rethink, for instance, the Posse Comitatus
situation and so on and so forth. That's what I'm referring to. We have
to be real careful that we don't overreact to a catastrophe, number one,
because they don't occur very often, and therefore, they're unique
events that cause us sometimes to perhaps make decisions based on
emotion and public perception and so on and so forth and not think
about, as I say, those constitutional, ethical, and political
considerations we need to have. That's what I meant and that was the
context in which I would hope you would take it.

**Bert Tussing:** First of all, as you probably know, sir, as I would
like most people to know, the people who were calling for the military
to take over were not the military. That's the one thing.

The second thing is my concern on this is you talked about extraordinary
measures having to be taken, but when those extraordinary measures have
to be taken, it should be done by the duly-constituted authorities. I
would agree with you on that in principle, but my concern in a genuine
catastrophe is when the capability of your first responders and your
government authorities has been eliminated, when the catastrophe itself
has made them part of the victims themselves. What then?

**Mike Selves:** I understand that question and that concern, but it
goes to the remarks I made about the education of our profession. One of
the things we absolutely have to do a better job of, at all levels of
government, is to make the decision makers aware of what their roles and
responsibilities are and to help us craft the way in which we respond
and operate during a catastrophe. I would suggest to you that the mayor
of New Orleans was perfectly capable of making decisions in that
catastrophe. The governor of Louisiana was perfectly capable of making
decisions in that catastrophe.

While the situation on the Gulf Coast was probably much more severe and
the local elected officials were affected to a much greater extent,
still there should be an effort to make sure we have that capability.
What we have to do is make sure the folks in those positions are able to
exercise political leadership, and I think that's one thing that we as
emergency managers really need to emphasize in the future, is preparing
our elected officials to be leaders in an emergency, to exercise
political leadership.

**Dr. Porto, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:** This is for
all the panelists: Where should emergency management be located
organizationally at the local level?

**Marg Verbeek:** I'll start with that, and maybe my colleagues---I
don't know if we share like minds in this regard, but from my
perspective, I have been doing this for 20 years and I have been working
with many, many communities across Ontario---about 30 or 40---so I've
been very privileged in the last 15 years to pick where do I want to
work and who do I want to work for, and I will only work in the front
office of an organization. I will not do emergency management out of
public works, out of transportation, out of health. That's fine if those
organizations individually also have an emergency manager, but as the
lead director or manager of that service, you need the political
connectivity and you need the position power of being in the front
office of the organization. We have been trying in many jurisdictions
for them to come around and see the light. My colleagues in Ontario who
are in those positions as I have cannot imagine being in other places
and we have become the envy of those who are not as well-positioned.

**Mike Selves:** Ditto.

**Matthew McCracken:** I could just ditto that as well, but I want to
expand on that just a minute to say the emergency manager is the
politician's brain when it comes to responding or recovering to
disasters. The emergency manager has to be as close as possible to the
chief elected official.

**Wayne Blanchard:** For some further elaboration on that question, I
would advise people to go to the Emergency Management Higher Education
Project website. The Practitioner's Corner tab in the left-hand side in
the blue column, and there's a paper by Mike Selves---and I forget the
name of the paper, but it was on where do you place emergency management
models, and he talks about the public administration model and he talks
specifically about the emergency services as a counter-model, and then
we added a paper by Dr. Francis Winslow Edwards, San Jose Emergency
Manager, now at San Jose State University positing yet a third model,
and that was the previous civil defense national security model of how
to organize emergency management locally. That's still a foundational
excellent paper that you wrote and it can be found in the Practitioner's
Corner on the Emergency Management Higher Education Project website.

**Bill Nicholson, North Carolina Central University:** As you all are
aware, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 basically relabeled emergency
managers as first responders. Could you briefly comment on your opinion
as to the pluses and minuses of that step?

**Mike Selves:** Initially, there were some pluses because it became
obvious post-DHS creation that if you weren't classified as an emergency
responder, you weren't in the system at all; so to that extent, it was
not a bad thing, and we used it because that's the only lever we had to
use to be involved in the process. I think ultimately it was a mistake
for a number of reasons that we've already talked about here---the need
for emergency managers to take a more transcendent view of government to
be like BASF is the way I've often explained it. We don't do the
response---we make the response better. We don't shelter people, but we
make it possible for it to be done more effectively---things of that
nature.

I think we have to and we are, though IAEM's Government Affairs
operation, as well as NEMA's Legislative Affairs function, beginning to
try to reestablish in the public sector that emergency management is a
separate unique function that is, as we have all pointed out, involved
in emergency response but not emergency responders, and we're making
some success in that respect. One of the major FEMA reorganized
emergency management bills that is coming out of the House we've had
significant input to that, and one of the most significant inputs we had
was inserting the words "emergency management" in about 25 or 26 places
in that bill where it did not exist. It's a constant fight, but it's one
of those things you have to deal with. We had to do it in the beginning
to be part of the game, and as we prove our worth and explain our
profession again to the decision makers and the policymakers, I think
we'll be successful in overcoming the disadvantages of that.

**Sue Sanderson, City of Detroit, Homeland Security Emergency Management
and new IAEM member:** The project management field has PMBOK, which is
the book of knowledge, and it has units and skill-sets for project
manager. I am not familiar as much with the emergency management body of
knowledge, but is there an effort to move forward with something like
that to have knowledge as well as skills that can be defined, for those
of us who are a little long in the tooth?

**Mike Selves:** The Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) program that IAEM
has now sponsored for a number of years is working on something called
the Common Body of Knowledge for Emergency Management. One of the
reasons we're having to do that is because there are more and more
requests and pressure to go international with the CEM program, and
obviously, certain major portions of the current CEM are oriented
towards the United States and to the lesser extent to Canada, and so
they are working on this body of knowledge.

I think you've hit on an important point: I don't think there is or know
if there has been a real attempt to try to distill down the profession
or the function of emergency management to its essential parts, and I
think that's one of the problems. I have been chair of the government
affairs committee for IAEM for five years now, working on Capitol Hill,
and the only way we have been able to be successful in any respect of
those five years is initially, we had to sit down with committee staff
and congressmen and others and explain what is emergency management,
what is the nature of the function that makes it different and unique
from other parts of the government, and it was only when we got through
that phase that we were able to make any progress and make them
understand why EMPG and various other things were so important. I don't
think we're there yet; I think somebody needs to do it. I'm retiring in
18 months, and I will give a stab at it, but I also have an 11-year-old
grandson, so that may take precedence over it; but you're right---we do
need to have that, and we need to have it distilled, and we need to have
it generally accepted by the community.

**Wayne Blanchard:** Two footnotes on that: For the question part of the
CEM application process was drawn up, all the questions came from ten
identified FEMA Independent Study courses and one book---Drabek and
Hoetmer's *Principles of Emergency Management for the International City
Managers Association*. In other words, they had thought and drawn up the
questions for the CEM that this was the body the knowledge. Also, if you
go to the Body of Knowledge tab on the EM High Ed Project website, there
are survey results from the IAEM last year on the body of knowledge.
This is a survey administered to emergency managers who are IAEM members
on their perceptions of the core body of knowledge from their point of
view.

**John Peabody, EMI:** A number of jurisdictions across the country have
required that all public employees have an emergency responsibility
written into their job descriptions and training is provided. For
instance, the city of Norfolk has 1400 trained by the Red Cross shelter
workers and managers which give them dramatically increased capability.
My question is: Is this practice becoming more widespread?

**Marg Verbeek:** From my own perspective, I'm not aware that it is.
It's certainly ideal if you have an opportunity, as we hire staff and
implement new training programs, that we have an ability to talk about
emergency readiness as a corporation and also double barreled to respond
adequately to the community. As we move into greater levels of pandemic
readiness, we will be better positioned to identify what other
skill-sets do we have and do we need and do we want to train for.

For many communities---anything that's over a small town, this is going
to be something that's rather difficult to implement, to put in place,
to keep up to date. It would require a remaining couple of 1000---my
organization, we have 3000 staff. We do adequate level of training and
education at all levels in our organization, but to actually say that
they've achieved things beyond some of the required elements, I think,
is very, very difficult, and we continue to partner with all of our
NGOs---Red Cross, St. John Ambulance, Mennonite Central Community, and a
whole array of other local responders---and they really complement the
work we do as paid professionals in terms of responding to and
mitigating and preparing for of course recovering from emergencies.

Again, I think it's very ideal, but in a large jurisdiction, I think
it's rather difficult and I congratulate those who are able to do it.

**Mike Selves:** Just anecdotally, in response to Katrina, my community
was tapped to shelter a certain number of evacuees from New Orleans. At
that time, we certainly realized that the capability of the Red Cross to
support us in any meaningful way was significantly lacking, at least in
our location, and our response to that---and we've gotten good
cooperation and buy-in from the cities of our county as well as county
government---was to set up a program where the Red Cross would train
shelter teens from the cities and from the county so we could establish
those. That's anecdotal---we're not talking about a system-wide movement
to that.

I think in the state of the profession at the local level being that if
we can get the local emergency manager in a position where he or she can
bring the people together to actually do planning to write an emergency
operations plan rather than filling out the blanks on a template, I
think we're at the point where that's something we need to be working
on. Obviously, once that's done, once we get to that level, then you can
start talking about training and involving the people in the government
more. Right now, it's just kind of if it happens, it happens, and I
don't think it's generally accepted.

**Matthew McCracken:** Just one quick thing I wanted to mention---that
of course with this presidential directives for homeland security and
things of this nature we're all required to have anybody that could
respond with you during the disaster to train to NIMS 5700, 800, and the
hurdles that we have to jump over in order to get the guy driving the
garbage truck and the police officer to sit down in a room to take these
courses together. It's very challenging to do the things that's
required, so like Marg said a moment ago, anything you get them to do
above that is just phenomenal.