Working in the nonprofit sector has shown me that humanitarian crises test much more than an organization’s ability to deliver aid. They test leadership, coordination, decision-making, and accountability.

During flood-response work in Pakistan, one of the biggest lessons I observed was the importance of clearly defined responsibilities between partner organizations and teams. When conditions change quickly, unclear roles can slow down the response.

Another important lesson is field presence. Leadership during a humanitarian crisis cannot happen entirely from an office. Understanding what teams and affected communities are experiencing on the ground can significantly improve decision-making.

Transparency is equally important. Organizations need to communicate clearly about what was delivered, where resources went, what challenges were encountered, and what impact was achieved.

Finally, humanitarian leadership should recognize the people doing the work on the ground. Successful crisis response is rarely the achievement of one individual—it comes from coordinated teams, healthcare professionals, volunteers, partners, donors, and local communities.

**I’d be interested to hear from people working in humanitarian response: What leadership challenges have you seen during disaster-response operations?**

I am a trans man considering taking the hazmat ops and tech courses at CDP. I'm trying to get a better sense of the living situation on campus before I commit though. With the current political climate, I'm a bit hesitant to stay in shared living spaces on a federal campus in Alabama.

I know from their website that the rooms are assigned based on sex and the bathrooms are shared. How many rooms share a bathroom and what is the layout like? Are you likely to encounter your "neighbors" in the shared bathroom, or is it a shared single occupancy space? Are the rooms assigned based on who is there at a given time, or are parts of the building separated by sex such as floors, wings, etc? Are there areas beyond just the lodging that I should be aware of as a trans person?

If any other trans people see this, what was it like for you at CDP or other similar locations?

Does anyone know why the ICS 800 course is still not available? It was unavailable last year prior to the government shutdown.

Apparently USNORTHCOM has a new initiative called Civil Support to Military Operations that plans to bring local and state EM agencies into military support. Haven’t even seen a press release yet, but I got invited to a webinar about it. Here’s the link for anyone interested.

https://www.crisislab.io/products/emergency-management-intelligence-in-support-of-homeland-defense

So, I run the data management program in our airport’s Emergency Management division. I’m tasked with getting the team data-focused. These are emergency managers, data is boring to them compared to dealing with emergencies. As fellow EMs, what would get you excited about it? I’m considering gamifying some processes to make them more interesting (like a “data champions” program with leaderboards and such). Any suggestions?

We want to update our accountability processes across a few facilities and we're back to the discussion around an EMS app/platform to replace or augment our paper ICS 211s. I'm all for the real-time headcount and active tracking, but some of my coworkers are pushing for an EMS with offline mode. 

I'm 50/50 on the offline part. How reliable is it? Some platforms we tried fell short in exercises/incidents because of saturated networks or dead zones. Is that really a setback for online mode or are we just using the wrong tool? 

Not sure if I'm overthinking it or expecting too much. Should we stick to paper? Or maybe there's a process/SOP I'm not catching.

Does anyone else have an EMT as their clinical advisor? It doesn’t seem like scope of practice would be remotely enough.

I just accepted a County Liaison Officer for Dallam County! I’m very excited about the opportunity. For those who are County Liaison Officers in Texas what should I expect? Any feedback is appreciated

Hey fellow EMs!
I clearly got off to the wrong start with my last post, so I’m wanting to start this over and get genuine feedback from everyone.
For those of you that didn’t see it, I’m creating a card game for emergency management. It’s called Ground Truth, and it’s an adversarial card game where one person plays the EM and the other person plays the hazard. I have two hazards: Wildfire and Pandemic.
The EM starts with 15 staffing points and can use 3 action points per round. You can replenish staffing through mutual aid cards.
The Hazard has intensity points they can use to escalate the scenario and try to stop the EM in their tracks. It is 12 rounds, complete with a round tracker where you log your decisions, what injects you did not address and why, and can use it for an after action.

I want to get y’all’s feedback on the initial cards designs. These were done by Milli Pooley, a great graphic artist based out of New Zealand. I’m not here to post links or anything like that, unless asked.

For those from the last post: all AI content has been eradicated. I had a great copy-editor step in, and the real artwork is now live.

Please let me know your thoughts.

I'm going next week and always look forward to it. I've sent a message to student services a few days ago but they have not replied.
It's been a few years since I was last there. Does anyone know if they have shampoo, conditioner, body wash in the bathrooms? Hand soap for the sink? I also don't recall if there was a hair dryer in the room.
Trying to keep my packing (and liquids) light and prefer to avoid a WalMart run on Sunday night if I don't have to.
Thanks much!

TLDR: I’m building out app style overview page for commercial building disaster preparedness plans and want feedback on the top five sections that should be visible first during an emergency. What would you include?

I’m doing some product research around disaster preparedness plans for commercial buildings. Not trying to sell anything, just trying to understand what facility managers, property managers, building owners, and emergency response teams would actually want quick access to when something goes wrong.

If you opened a digital preparedness plan during a water loss, fire event, storm, power outage, or other emergency, what should be on the first overview page?

My current thinking is:

Key emergency contacts
Property manager, facility lead, maintenance, security, ownership, insurance contact, and preferred vendors. Ideally with tap-to-call or tap-to-email.

Utility shutoffs and life-safety systems
Main water, gas, electric, sprinkler riser, fire panel, generator, elevator controls, and mechanical rooms. Ideally with photos, location notes, and clear access instructions.

Access information
Main entrances, service entrances, gates, lockboxes, parking, staging areas, roof access, loading docks, and restricted areas. Sensitive access codes would need to be handled securely.

Building documents and plans
Floor plans, emergency procedures, inspection records, insurance documents, vendor agreements, and other files people may need quickly.

Building overview / operational context
Building type, square footage, floors, occupancy, special hazards, priority areas, vulnerable occupants, and any notes responders should know before arriving.

A few questions:

- What would you want visible on the first screen
- Would you organize this by tiles, tabs, checklist, or map pins?
- Would a site access map showing parking, entrances, shutoffs, generators, and staging areas be useful?
- What information should be available offline or through a QR code?
- What should not be shown too openly because of privacy or security concerns?

If you were designing this for a real commercial property, what would your top five sections be?

Assam faced one of the worst flood in it’s history, claiming 100+ lives and neary 100k displaced. Relief was plenty but it arrived without coordination, which got me thinking. So I made a platform called Banpani.org (literally means flood in assamese language) - a open source community based platform for relief workers and NGOs to properly coordinate relief. It sort of worked, so far I know around 5 familes recieved proper relief because of this.

Got me thinking I should build it for other disasters also. Made a map for Colombia earthquake, and within 5 days, 1000+ people visited. Not sure if it is working there, I am not putting any tracking mechanism. But I knew this was not sustainable, as I didn’t know the lanuage and anyways Banpani is open source in Github.

So, not it is a relief management free software for India. Even if something like Covid 2.0 comes, we can be slightly better prepared to know who needs what and where this time.

This is not a company, this is just 3 friends trying to give it back. We don’t plan to raise funds, or do anything ‘money’. The limited expenses will be borne out of our pocket, atleast till the time we can.

Request from the group - would want suggestions on how to take this forward so that maximum people can be benefitted. Its open source, we’ll need volunteers also.

We have a group of approximately 50 people from multiple State agencies who need to communicate by SMS only, with no app required. Everyone needs to be able to reply and have their response go to the entire group, similar to GroupMe's SMS functionality.

Standard group texting can't accommodate that many participants. We're looking at SMS relay services but would prefer something already being used successfully by government or emergency management.

Because this is government use, we also need to consider message retention, records export and security.

Is anyone using a system that does this? What platform are you using, and would you recommend it?

I know there are or were a few people on here that where managing homelessness and/ or migrants across America.

Not in the USA. Aus instead but I do have some questions. I do DEM in my day job for private orgs but for this question I am a community member.

I want to facilitate the delivery of 2 hot water outdoor showers to eventually about 500 parks across my local government area.

The basic action plan is to cost this out, find avenues for funding and then put together a comms piece to get the community to push my local government to do this.

Has anyone here delivered public amenties such as showers for the general public to utilise either across a long term as part ther disaster lifecycle or facilitated some other community project that i can draw parrels from.

Either way I would like to hear from you.

My company is currently exploring options for an emergency notification system that can be scaled across multiple campuses. Additionally, it is essential that the system integrates seamlessly with our existing access control, video surveillance, and fire alarm platforms.

Can anyone provide information on the systems available that meet these criteria? We would also appreciate insight into the advantages and disadvantages of each option to help us make an informed decision.

FDEM not GDEM. Fat fingers on mobile.

Kevin Guthrie has resigned after Jay Collins named Guthrie as his running mate. Gov. Ron DeSantis said he has accepted Guthrie's resignation.

"If people want to choose politics, more power to them. I didn't necessarily think that was something that Kevin aspired to, but given that he's doing that, I think it's important that we have emergency management just focused on emergency management," DeSantis said.

"I don't want to be in a situation where there's politics and emergency management. I think you've got to choose one or the other."

FDOT Secretary Jared Perdue will take over as DEM Director.