Emergency Management Interview Analysis
Project description
address the following course competencies:
•Evaluate the application of all hazard mitigation effort used to reduce community risk
•Evaluate the components of community resiliency as it pertains to disaster.
Overview
In this assignment, you will review and analyze an interview with an emergency manager, provided in Emergency Manager Interview media piece assigned in this unit’s study.
Instructions
Read the Emergency Management Interview media piece provided BELOW is the transcript),
assignment’s resources. read the responses to these questions:
•Question 1: Describe how you participate in the planning and action stages of disaster preparedness and mitigation.
•Question 2: Describe a time when you have taken part in either disaster preparedness planning or mitigation efforts that included simulation trainings.
•Question 3: What value do you place on preparedness planning and mitigation efforts to ensure citizen safety?
•Question 4: What strategies have you used to build support for a community to invest in preparedness and mitigation efforts?
After listening to the interview, prepare and submit a 3-page paper analyzing the interview. Include the following, using a minimum of two proper APA citations from other peer-reviewed academic journal article sources
1.Briefly identify the interviewee, his or her position and background, and your interest in his or her area of expertise
2.Analyze the interviewee’s responses, quoting the interview as needed. Your analysis should include how the interviewee contributes to community resilience and preparedness.
3.Evaluate techniques utilized by the interviewee to improve community preparedness or hazard mitigation.
4.Explain the value of speaking to people working in the field as research and theory in emergency management is applied to practice in the solving of real world problems to ensure citizen safety.
Additional Requirements
•References: Include a minimum of two scholarly references.
•Style and Format: Use proper APA (6th edition) electronic source citation format and style, providing both in-text citations and a reference list.
•Font and font size: Times New Roman, 12 point.
THIS IS THE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
WRITE PAPER OFF OF THIS INTERVIEW
Emergency Management Interview
Daniel Martin, PhD, CEM, CFM
Describe how you participate in the planning and action stages of disaster preparedness and mitigation. How does an emergency manager influence change?
The preparedness and mitigation planning process really starts well before you even open up a plan and put a paper to a pen. It really starts in building support and understanding from a lot of the key stakeholders throughout your community. The key stakeholders are not only your elected officials, and individuals in key power positions within your organization. But also, external power brokers that exist through other organizations that are involved in the various disaster preparedness and mitigation efforts. Oftentimes, you’ll hit a roadblock in developing a lot of your planning and preparedness efforts, specifically associated with preparedness and mitigation by these power brokers simply because they don’t understand, haven’t been involved in that kind of inductive process of the need for planning.
Creating an aura of influence within the community. That influence is the kind of influence of change. So the emergency manager is often time in that position to become a change agent. So many times when there’s change, and change is needed, sometimes these, the various external power brokers are not comfortable with that change. So a lot of times they’ll sit there and they’ll push back against these change agents because simply it’s against what they commonly understand and what they’re familiar with. So that emergency manager is really a component of that person’s position is to facilitate understanding and awareness. And it really starts even before you start a plan.
Because in order to initiate the various planning efforts, and building that support for the necessary actions, you know, it starts well before they ever open up a book or they put a paper to a pen. They have to have the meeting of these brokers support, oftentimes its contingent upon getting grant funding for the various efforts. You know, one of my mentors in emergency management, Dr. Dennis Melitti, what he always coined was one of the most important line items in an emergency manager’s budget is lunch. Basically nobody wants to talk about bad things. Putting it on these power brokers’ calendars, you need to entice them and capture their attention. Everyone likes a free lunch. But the idea is that you want to capture their attention. You want them to understand. You need to take that time to meet with individuals so you can kind of share that situational understanding and awareness of what is needed in their community
A lot of how these operational phases of emergency management is, or how they are perceived is often driven by that individual’s perception from their experiences and whatnot. You know, I’ve worked a lot of different disasters and have seen some, you know, large catastrophes. And so I’ve been through recovery for a community that’s been absolutely destroyed by disaster. I was talking to an individual who happened to be a firefighter and their perspective of disaster is a little bit different in that they define recovery as bing when they board up a home and walk away. Right? And from a firefighter perspective, they’re right. From emergency management perspective, that boarded up home, you now have displaced individuals, displaced families. You have an issue where you have to actually tear down the home, you have to remove debris from around the field, around the property of the home. You’re going to have insurance claims on that home and a lot of other issues that you’re going to have to consider. And so, although some of these emergency managers might not be involved in the intricate operational details of that immediate six hours of response, you know, each individual is having a different perspective on how they define that operational period of recovery. You can go through the various phases, preparedness or mitigation and have that same type of understanding. Oftentimes you know there’s a big effort to do a lot of mitigation planning. That’s a good example where you have mitigation efforts, where you’re trying to identify those opportunities to build resiliency within your community. When we start looking at, the delineation between mitigation and preparedness and just that one effort, you actually have kind of a joint phase of emergency management if you will. Where you’re actually doing both. You’re developing plans and preparing to implement mitigation actions. You have the same thing with recovery. There’s been a big push, especially like in the state of Florida. Develop pre disaster recovery plans. Again, it’s another example where you have a preparedness effort where you’re able to enhance the capabilities of an operational phase of managing disaster. So kind of going back and circling back to your original question. There really is not a defined delineation between these phases. They kind of blend into each other. A lot of times they overlap each other. And so when people, when you start hearing about the emergency management cycle, or comprehensive emergency management, you know, it’s more of a philosophy and conceptualization than really kind of an operational reality.
Describe a time when you have taken part in either disaster preparedness planning or mitigation efforts that included simulation trainings.
In a recent consulting opportunity that we did, one thing that we tried to do with my business is we tried to develop innovative solutions. So we’re always thinking out of the box in how to better engage participants and better engage the community and to kind of elevate that understanding and awareness of whatever the issue might be within
