By the HazNet Editorial team
In Canada, modern emergency management as a professional field distinct from civil defense and first response has somewhat struggled to land on its feet, born out of crisis and maturing through tumultuous times. The result is a dynamic field with varying levels of specification, certification, and application – yet, there is one thing that most emergency managers can agree upon: the landscape unto which the field was born exists no more. Gone are the days of single events that defined careers, replaced by concurring and cascading events that become so enmeshed, it is almost impossible to colour within the blurred lines. As nimble as emergency managers are, the systems that support us are barely able to keep up, leaving us to navigate the evolving field of emergency management, with the hope that we can help steer the ship in the right direction.
An origin story: The Natural Hazards Workshop and the beginnings of CRHNet
Every July since 1975, in the peak heat of Colorado summer, the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder has hosted the Annual Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop. Serving as the National Science Foundation’s designated information clearinghouse for the societal dimensions of hazards and disasters, the center organizes the Workshop to bring together researchers, government, non-profit, and private sector champions dedicated to alleviating the impacts of disasters.
It was after attending the Workshop in the early 2000s that David Etkin and Emdad Haque supported by Grace Koshida, Larry and Laurie Pearce, Valerie Hwacha, Jack Lindsay, Judith McIntire, Gordon McBean, and Lianne Bellisario decided to create the Canadian Risk and Hazard Network (CRHNet) and its annual symposium to bring the emergency management community together. Established in 2003, it continues to promote and strengthen disaster risk reduction and emergency management in Canada. In 2009, the organization created a platform to serve the information needs of practitioners and researchers working in the fields of disaster risk reduction, emergency management and resilience, creating HazNet, the magazine of CRHNet.
The evolving field of emergency management
Team members from HazNet were in attendance at the recent 2023 workshop. During the plenary titled ‘State of Emergency—Resource Commitments and Compassion in an Age of Extremes,’ four emergency managers from San Francisco, Philadelphia, Denver, and Los Angeles shared their experiences in responding to compounding social and environmental disasters. These four speakers were members of the Big City Emergency Managers (BCEM), an independent, non-profit organization founded in 2005, with a mission to “foster the development and growth of robust and nimble emergency management operations in the nation’s largest, most at-risk metropolitan jurisdictions so that the country is better positioned to prevent, protect against, mitigate, prepare for, respond to and recover from major incidents and catastrophic emergencies.”
Panelists at the State of Emergency—Resource Commitments and Compassion in an Age of Extremes Plenary. Left to right: Matthew Mueller, Patrick Roberts, Carol Parks, Dominick Mireles, Mary Ellen Carroll. Image credit: Chip Van Zandt.
As Canadian emergency managers face many similar challenges in this era of increasing crises, it is an opportune time to learn from the lessons shared by our neighbours. The HazNet team has summarized the most salient points from this panel in this piece, highlighting the complex nature of emerging from a pandemic while facing increasingly unstable social, environmental, and political landscapes.
“Mission creep”: From acute emergencies to extended crises
One of the key challenges facing the field of emergency management is “mission creep”: responding to more and more socio-economic crises beyond traditional hazards. The panelists described activating emergency operations centres for emergencies, ranging from homelessness to the opioid epidemic, to finding emergency shelter for migrants and refugees. While this “mission creep” began prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was general agreement that the pandemic marked a turning point for the field as it thrust the behind-the-scenes work of most emergency management organizations into the spotlight. Elected officials, senior leaders, and the public gained a new appreciation for the role emergency managers could play in convening partners to coordinate the response to difficult situations.
We are the ultimate problem solvers.
COVID-19 was the thing that catapulted us (emergency managers) into a different sphere of responsibility. The perspective of emergency management has really changed, in many ways for the positive. People now understood what we did and our “secret sauce”. We are the ultimate problem solvers. We are the conveners. Since COVID-19, we’ve been brought into anything that has the definition of a crisis.
San Francisco’s Emergency Operations Center during APEC (Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation), a designated National Special Security Event (NSSE). Photo Credit: Mary Ellen Carroll
For San Francisco we have been coordinating the response to homelessness, the opioid epidemic, overdoses, and now we are in the business of running what we call a drug market agency coordination centre. We are working arm-in-arm with law enforcement combined with what we were already doing around street conditions. I have two licensed social workers on my staff now because we have a whole new division.
Mary Ellen Carroll, San Francisco
Since 2018 we have activated in response to six distinct headline-worthy events that I know were not part of our playbook prior to 2018.
On July 4, we evacuated our annual concert and fireworks celebration due to severe storms. Tragically, we had an active shooter mass shooting event where five people were killed. In June, we experienced a major collapse of I-95 causing complete closure for 12 days. Then in March, we monitored and began enacting a water distribution strategy as the freshwater intake for 400,000 Philadelphians was at risk of toxic exposure due to a chemical spill. I would say we have the traditional risks pretty well covered.
We also activated the Emergency Operation Centre in 2018 for 90 days to address the opioid crisis. We’ve supported planning and operations for five homeless encampments over the past three years. I was there from when the US Army Core first called to inquire about available shelter facilities for evacuated Afghans, until the last of 29,713 people came through our international airport. I stood beside our City Manager while controversial statues were taken down or boxed up during 2020 and I was there at 6 a.m. last November when a bus from Texas brought the first of 1,739 migrants and counting to the City of Philadelphia. Since 2018 we have activated in response to six distinct headline-worthy events that I know were not part of our playbook prior to 2018.
We’ve found ourselves trying to use the emergency management apparatus that’s been built for floods and fires to other types of crises. For local emergency management, I don’t see it changing if we continue to build into risky areas, if we continue to have political divisiveness over what the research tells us are ways to address these systemic issues.
Dominick Mireles, Philadelphia
When I took this job as an emergency manager back in 1998, things were fairly calm. The city was recovering from the El Nino rainstorms and we were doing a lot of Preparedness Fairs and fun things. We were even gearing up for Y2K. Life was good. Life was simple. Fast forward 25 years, can you imagine what our lists of concerns are? New non-traditional issues. Migrant movement. Extreme heat. Severe weather. COVID-19 recovery. Homelessness. Balancing all of the special and mega events that come to the City of Los Angeles. So we have a lot going on. By the way, our EOC was activated for 1,065 days.
While [emergency managers] do not have all the answers, we are called upon to bring everybody to the table for the hazard or the issue of the day.
Carol Parks, Los Angeles
One of the things I think is interesting is the use of emergency declarations and the use of the emergency operation centre. It’s not new to emergency management, we’ve been doing that forever, it’s a shift in how governments utilize emergency management. Elected officials have realized that declaring a state of emergency and activating the emergency operations centre is a very public, very visible way to say, “This is a crisis and I am taking this seriously.”
We were under emergency declaration for Covid-19 for two years, we have been under emergency declaration for the migrant and asylum seeker influx now for about seven months. Is this a political statement or is the use of an emergency declaration and activation of an EOC a viable mechanism to address the needs?
Matthew Mueller, Denver
Sprinting a marathon: The evolving role of an emergency manager
While there is clear value emergency managers can bring to a wide range of crises, the increasing demands present new challenges: prolonged activations are stretching resources thin, while traditional training and planning in emergency management has failed to keep up with the rapid rate of change. Many emergency managers enter the field out of a desire to help people in crisis and the increase in scope provides new opportunities to do that; however, the response model is not sustainable when activations last months or years. The panelists reflected on some of the unique situations they have dealt with and the strain it has begun to put on their teams.
As emergency managers, we have learned to become professional pivoters. During COVID-19, everybody was talking about ‘well I have to pivot to do this and pivot to do that.’ We have learned how to pivot because we not only have to deal with one thing at one time, we deal with multiple things at one time and we are called upon to have answers.
Carol Parks, Los Angeles
Since 2020, how emergency management is utilized and how we are viewed has changed drastically. Between 2006-2019, we averaged three Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) activations and an average of four days in the EOC per year. Since 2020, we’ve gone to four EOC activations per year for an average of 88 days per year. When you look at the growth, things have changed dramatically. I actually had to have a conversation with our budget office saying, ‘I’ve got 4 years of data saying this trend isn’t changing and we need to take a long, hard look at how we’re resourced based on those expectations.’
Matthew Mueller, Denver
Denver Downtown, Aerial drone shot. Photo Credit: City and County of Denver
Hardwired to help, but stretched thin for increasingly complex emergencies
Managing complex social emergencies requires new skill sets as part of emergency management. In San Francisco, this meant getting licensed social workers on staff:
For San Francisco we have been coordinating the response to homelessness, the opioid epidemic, overdoses, and now we are in the business of running what we call a drug market agency coordination centre. We are working arm-in-arm with law enforcement combined with what we were already doing around street conditions. I have two licensed social workers on my staff now because we have a whole new division.
Mary Ellen Carroll, San Francisco
In Philadelphia, managing complex social emergencies also meant finding solutions for unmet needs:
When partners say ‘we don’t have a mandate or authority here’ or ‘our funding doesn’t cover that’? If the definition of emergency management is ‘the managerial function charged with creating the framework within which communities reduce vulnerability to hazards and cope with disaster’ I guess we emergency managers do all that.
You’d expect the Director of a Big City Emergency Management department to be a systems builder. I do that…and then sometimes I’m literally at the store buying pet food for a shelter because the supplier in our plan doesn’t have after-hours access to the supplies. With this dichotomy in mind, what do you do when the emergency management scope has ended but you’re actively watching someone fall through the cracks? When partners say ‘we don’t have a mandate or authority here’ or ‘our funding doesn’t cover that’? If the definition of emergency management is ‘the managerial function charged with creating the framework within which communities reduce vulnerability to hazards and cope with disaster’ I guess we emergency managers do all that. Personally, I’m pretty hardwired to want to help somebody when they are in need; that’s why I love this work. But as a leader I need to acknowledge that not everybody shares that viewpoint, and emergency managers aren’t necessarily trained to face these complex issues. So what tools do we have in this space and what does success look like?
Dominick Mireles, Philadelphia
Where we go from here: “We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are”
The world is changing more rapidly than we can adapt, with new and emerging crises on the horizon. While traditional hazards such as floods and fires are not going away – and in fact are accelerating in frequency and intensity – the demands on emergency managers continue to increase. Panelists shared the view that emergency managers have a lot to offer in managing crises, with a valuable skill set in bringing people together to solve problems. But the traditional tools we rely on – incident action plans, 24/7 emergency operations centre activations, government-centric planning and response – often do not work as well when applied to these increasingly complex humanitarian and socio-economic crises. Reflecting on where the profession is headed, the panelists offered suggestions on how emergency managers can begin to prepare now for an uncertain future.
You’re a facilitator and a trust worker.
The fact is that emergency managers do approach problems differently. There’s something special about simultaneously not owning any of the problem space but still being in a leadership role. You’re a facilitator and a trust worker.
Now, I don’t think that emergency management should be applied to everything. We aren’t solving systemic issues and sometimes we’re just used as a band aid. You really do need to have a passion for this work. It’s not easy.
Dominick Mireles, Philadelphia
Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Jose Lozano for LA Sanitation and Environment.
It is such an amazing field in the sense that you get to delve into so many different areas and it’s never boring. In San Francisco, we need project managers, analysts, community representation (people who come from and know the community), GIS folks, social workers, and so on. But we never have enough positions, so it’s looking at developing skills across the board: project management, analysis, being able to talk to different people. Emergency management is less and less about writing 500-page incident actions plans and a million page emergency plans; it’s not the plan that’s helpful but the planning process.
Mary Ellen Carroll, San Francisco
When we think about all the tools in our tool box, I ask myself “well what’s missing” and “who is missing”.
We have to embrace this new normal and look for ways to find solutions and empower our residents. When we think about all the tools in our tool box, I ask myself “well what’s missing” and “who is missing”. We need to go out and talk to people both in the community, to learn what’s happening on a day-to-day basis and to look beyond the traditional walls of government: places of worship, researchers, the practitioners, the engineers, the architects, the scientists and the list goes on. When we look at what’s on our new plate – and we don’t have just a regular size plate, we have a platter – even though the issues are complex, we have an opportunity to make a real difference.
I love the quote from Max De Pree, who said “we cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are”. The past has taught us that the future may not be in our history books.
Carol Parks, Los Angeles
Find out more
You can listen to the full panel session on YouTube, read the closing comments from the 2023 Workshop, and learn more about the annual meeting on the website for the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Graphic artist captures the State of Emergency—Resource Commitments and Compassion in an Age of Extremes Plenary. Image credit: Chip Van Zandt.
Bios
Mary Ellen Carroll is the executive director of the Department of Emergency Management in San Francisco. She oversees a department responsible for leading San Francisco in planning, preparedness, communications, response, and recovery for daily emergencies, large City-wide events and major disasters. Her responsibilities include the overall operations of San Francisco’s 9-1-1 center, Emergency Operations Center, and the City’s emergency public alert and warning systems.
Carroll has almost 25 years of experience in local public service, including 15 with the City and County of San Francisco. Throughout her tenure in San Francisco, she has led numerous incident command activations, managed the City’s pilot policy on drone usage, wrote the initial iteration of the continuity plan for the City’s financial system, managed the response to the 2013 Rim Fire that resulted in almost $50 million in damage to San Francisco city assets, and has deployed in a mutual assistance role to regional disasters including several wildfires. She is a certified emergency manager, as well as a surfer, backpacker, soccer player, and mother.
Carroll holds a bachelor’s in International Studies from George Washington University and a master’s in Urban Studies from Virginia Tech.
Dominick Mireles was appointed director of the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) by Mayor Jim Kenney in April, 2022. As the director, Mireles oversees all aspects of the City’s planning for, response to, and recovery from emergencies, disasters, and complex planned public events, working jointly with other city, state, federal and non-governmental entities in the execution of this mission.
Over the past seven years of his career with OEM, Mireles has provided strategic guidance and oversight to four program areas in the application of an all-hazards emergency management program, including the emergency operations center, information technology, logistics, and the Regional Integration Center. Mireles also served as OEM’s logistics program manager and the group leader for OEM’s Regional Integration Center and the project manager for several new and sensitive initiatives, including the roll-out of ReadyPhiladelphia.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and is currently enrolled in a master’s program at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security. Mireles also volunteers with Team Rubicon, which mobilizes veterans to help people prepare, respond and recover from disasters and humanitarian crises.
Matthew Mueller is the executive director of the Denver Office of Emergency Management (Denver OEM). He has spent his professional career of more than 20 years dedicated to the fields of emergency management and humanitarian assistance. In his role as executive director, he is responsible for the strategic oversight of emergency preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation for the City and County of Denver. He also serves as chair of the Urban Area Security Initiative, the Securing the Cities Executive Committee, and the Local Emergency Planning Committee. Additionally, he serves on the Governor’s Homeland Security Advisory Council.
Prior to joining Denver OEM in 2009, Mueller worked as a public health preparedness planner and for the American Red Cross Bay Area as the assistant director of Disaster Services. He began his professional career as a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance where he served on response teams for humanitarian crises throughout Africa. Additionally, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali where he managed clean water and sanitation projects.
Mueller holds a BS in civil engineering from the University of Iowa and an MBA from the Dominican University of California. He is a certified business continuity Professional and a master exercise practitioner. He is a Chicago native and a proud Denver resident.
Carol Parks is the general manager for the City of Los Angeles Emergency Management Department. She was promoted to this position in August 2021, after serving as a senior emergency manager for 20 years with LA City. During her career, she has provided oversight for both long and short-term executive-level citywide emergency management projects and programs involving department-specific and/or multi-agency and multi-jurisdiction coordination. This includes initiatives such as the automated external defibrillation program; the tsunami evacuation route initiative; the disaster service worker program; a supply chain resilience pilot study; disability, access, and functional needs planning and training; homeland security grants; emergency management planning, operations, and facility contracts; and citywide community preparedness initiatives including the current Ready Your LA Neighborhood program.
She has served in several oversight roles for the Emergency Operations Center activation for the COVID-19 activation. Ensuring that Angelenos and business owners are well informed and prepared for disaster is her career-long passion and she has served on leadership teams for Emergency Network Los Angeles and the Earthquake Country Alliance. Additionally, Parks has received numerous City and County Awards and recognition as a co-producer of an Emmy Award-winning public service announcement on the importance of family preparedness.
Parks is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology with a bachelors in industrial management and holds a masters from Georgia State University in instructional Design. She and her husband have three daughters. She is an active member of her church and enjoys traveling, decorating and horseback riding.
