Emergency Management

First of all, I would like to “Thank you” for visiting the APWA Emergency Management Committee website. Our membership in 2012-2013 consists of representatives from a broad spectrum of professional expertise, regions (California to New England), and jurisdictional sizes. Emergency management continues to grow in importance for public works leaders from preparation, response, and recovery from natural disasters to Cyber Security.  Each one of the Emergency Management members has devoted countless hours representing APWA to ensure and strengthen public works by participating in over a dozen federal coalitions, task forces and workgroups. 

An APWA Presidential Task Force (the Emergency Management Think Tank) was appointed with an overall mission to make recommendations to the APWA Board of Directors in developing a pathway to best position APWA and its membership in becoming a leader in national emergency management activities. At their June 2011 meeting, the Board of Directors approved the recommendations presented in the Think Tank Final Report and directed the Emergency Management Committee to formulate a process and timeline for addressing the recommendations.  Through our network of subcommittees we are diligently working to address individual recommendations which will result in the release of several new programs and initiatives.  Watch the web site and infoNOW for announcements.

FEMA brought select APWA members to their EMI campus to evaluate gaps in training for public works professionals.   As a result of their recommendations, FEMA allocated funds to develop four on-line training programs geared towards Public Works professionals.  The programs are independent study and are as follows: 

IS-552 The Public Works Role in Emergency Management
IS-554 Emergency Planning for Public Works
IS-556 Damage Assessment for Public Works
IS-558 Public Works and Disaster Recovery

The committee recognizes there is still much work to be done in getting public works professionals recognized for our role as first responders. We believe it is important for all members to acknowledge their role as a first responder by participating with other first responders in planning, training, and exercising to ensure our agencies can mitigate, prepare, respond and recover from incidents to the best of our ability to support our communities.  To support this effort we recommend that agencies have their employees take the appropriate Incident Command System (ICS) training to become more National Incident Management System (NIMS) compliant. 

If you would like to be involved in the work of the Emergency Management Committee or one of the subcommittees, please contact me (kblomquist@ci.keene.nh.us) or any of the other committee members.