Climate change and its results are hardly the only challenge facing David Maxwell, chief of the state Department of Emergency Management, which has 90 employees and a budget of $148.4 million.
“The world of emergency preparedness keeps getting bigger and bigger, I think,” he said. “We’ve grown from where we are completely reactive to a proactive discipline.”
Maxwell cited the state’s recent late winter snows as an example. “The governor getting National Guard soldiers and airmen out — that was all done proactively. We had them in place before any of the weather occurred.”
Citizens and elected officials expect more now from emergency responders, who, he said, now seek to anticipate problems and have solutions at the ready. “The traditional role model is that you wait and see what the damage is and get requests in for assistance and go along that way. But if we can prevent that damage in the first place or that situation, we need to do that.”
The shift in expectations began with Hurricane Andrew in August 1992, Maxwell said. In a nationally televised news conference, Kate Hale, Miami-Dade’s director of the emergency services, begged for federal help: “Where the hell is the cavalry on this one?”
The wholly inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was another “watershed,” Maxwell said, adding, however, that emergency response suffered “a complete breakdown” on all levels, local, state and federal.
“I think every FEMA director, now administrator, since then has said, ‘We’re not going to be caught like Michael Brown was.’”
And between those two hurricanes was the event that wasn’t: Y2K.
That nonevent illustrated how emergency management could be seen as a “consequence management function rather than just a disaster function,” Maxwell said.
“We worked closely with computer guys and with all the agencies, at least in Arkansas, and I think it was pretty much the same nationwide, to do continuity of operations planning, all of that kind of stuff, getting ready for the event that didn’t happen. I think that enhanced and maybe brought up expectations of emergency management.”
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