IAEM Disaster Zone Column, March 2022
When Will We Be Done?
I was appearing before my county council on some matter. It could have been the expenditure of grant funds or reporting on the status of regional planning and other activities. A councilmember during that meeting asked me the question, “When will we be done?” To clarify, what he wanted to really know was, “When will we be done with all this emergency management stuff?” The planning, the training, the exercises and in his case, “the spending of money” on the above efforts.
It is an easy answer for us emergency managers say, “Well, we’ll never be done!” Not what he wanted to hear of course. He was very much a fiscal conservative and he saw all the expenditure of time, effort and money as not yielding much in the way of tangible benefits.
In another instance, I was appearing before the Port of Tacoma Commission once and looking to get approval to expend 100% federal Maritime Security Grant funding for a regional, multi-port disaster exercise series that would look at the financial impacts of disasters to ports. One commissioner voted no to the expenditure of funds. Her rationale, “We had a big exercise six years ago and we don’t need another one.” The measure did pass with the one lone dissenting vote. Wow, six years ago. I wonder how many people are still around who participated in that exercise? Gee, do you think everything they learned, for those who did participate, is now stuck in their brains permanently?
What the above stories show is that there is little comprehension on the part of many people in senior positions of leadership, be they elected or perhaps appointed. This points to the challenge we have of continuing to communicate what it is we do and the value of our contribution. You might not be able to feel it, touch it, drive it, but what we do is important to the good of the order, especially when that “good of the order” is interrupted by emergencies and disasters.
One technique I used to communicate our importance to elected officials was to be very active in working with all forms of the 4th Estate, the media. I always gave all my contact information to reporters and assignment editors and news directors. This included my home number. My pitch was that I’m available 24/7/365, except for leap years when it is 366 days.
I did this for two purposes. One is I wanted them to get good credible information on whatever was going on. If I could not help them out, I had rolodexes full of my contacts who they could contact to get the scoop they needed. They are going to talk to someone, better it be us professionals then some wild-eyed whacko who is spouting off.
My second purpose was to keep emergency management in the public’s eye. We are not just fighting submarine warfare here. By being invisible to the public we are out of sight and out of mind—as are the disaster mitigation or preparedness steps they could be taking.
A byproduct of the media relationship was that elected officials follow the news closely. By being visible there, they too became better informed and also hopefully saw the positive media attention that our efforts can bring forth.
The largest single expenditure of county funds ever made for disaster readiness in King County, WA was for the construction of a $30M Emergency Coordination Center and Sheriff’s Office 911 Center. I thought it was a bit ironic that when the fiscally conservative councilmember who first asked me the question about “When will we be done?” died after a long illness while still serving in office. It was decided to name the building after the councilmember. I can in retrospect, assure the councilmember that it was a great investment for the future of disaster resilience in the county.
And no, we are still not done!
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by Eric E. Holdeman, Senior Fellow, Emergency Management Magazine
He blogs at www.disaster-zone.com His Podcast is at Disaster Zone
