Welcome! And, what the heck is emergency management?

Lane County Emergency Manager Tiffany Brown talks big picture about what emergency management does when disaster strikes. 

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• When It Hits The Fan webpage
• Ready.gov preparedness resources

Listen online or on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Podcasts  or Spotify.

You can find more information, including episodes and show notes, at LaneCountyOR.gov/fan. Sign up to receive emergency alerts at LaneAlerts.org.

The views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of Lane County Government.

Transcript

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Introduction

Welcome to When It Hits the Fan, Lane County's favorite podcast for all things emergency preparedness. Whether you're just dipping your toes into the world of emergency preparedness or you've been building bunkers since Y2K, we've got something for you. Hosted by Lane County Emergency Management, this podcast is all about equipping you with the knowledge and resources to be prepared and stay safe, no matter what hits the fan.

Devon

Well, welcome to the first episode of When It Hits the Fan. Tiffany, thank you for taking the time to do this with me today. Let's just dig in a little bit and talk about why we're here.

Tiffany

That's great. Thank you for having me. Devon, this is such a great idea. I really want to hear from you. I am sort of late to the game and just thrilled to be part of it. I'll talk about why I think it's important, but I want to hear from you first.

Devon

We've been looking for ways to help our community become more prepared for disaster. I know that you are new to Lane County in the role of emergency manager, but you're also very aware of our recent history. We have had multiple federally declared disasters, fires, flooding. And it is something that our community faces on a more regular basis than in previous generations.

Devon

And so, you know, our goal is to provide another avenue for people to get that preparedness information and hopefully engage both in their individual preparedness at home and understanding what response and emergency management looks like. I hope that is a similar goal to yours.

Tiffany

Absolutely. I just take it one step further. Having done this work for so long and understanding the challenges of doing this important work, we're sort of the insurance premium for the bad day that everybody hopes won't happen. And they have so many other things on their mind. So, it's always good to have another tool to talk to people and tell them about the importance of this work and help them understand how they can participate and become more prepared at the end of the day.

Tiffany

This is really as much about building a new culture in our region as it is about preparedness for me. Preparedness is about building a kit and getting people prepared. But my goal is that people wake up in this region every day, and preparedness is just part of what they think about on a daily basis.

Devon

You have been doing this work for a long time, but for folks in our community that haven't gotten to meet you yet: What has led you to become the subject matter expert that you are today?

Tiffany

Thank you. It's such a big job that being called a subject matter expert feels a little humbling. There's always so much more to know and so much more to do than we have in front of us every day. My title is County Emergency Manager for Lane County, and it's a new county for me, but it is not a new job.

Tiffany

I was the Clatsop County Emergency manager for 12 years up on the North Coast. That's Astoria, Warrenton, Seaside, Cannon Beach and Gearhart. And in that role, I did this job. On the North Coast there was a real focus on tsunami and earthquake. We talked a lot about the Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake because we were at ground zero for that and knew that we would be really challenged when the event happened.

Tiffany

So I'm excited to be here and in Lane County. I'm sort of not taking off my tsunami hat. We have residents in Florence, but I have new hazards to get my arms around. Wildfire, dam failure, and I'm just delighted to be here. I lived here about 25 years ago and it feels good to be back.

Devon

We are glad to have you. Although I am not sure anyone from Lane County Government is real popular in Clatsop County right now, but they'll get over it eventually. So, because we are going to spend time sort of diving into this topic, let's talk about what emergency management is and what it isn't.

Tiffany

I love starting there. It is such a misunderstanding. Frankly, the job I do is really not well understood. And I think that's partly because it varies so greatly in terms of what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis, or even the role of my agency during a disaster. Let's start with emergency response. We all know what that is.

Tiffany

It's what we see every day. It's police, fire and public works and public health doing the things that they do every day. And it and it generally works really well. When their resources are taxed, they have mutual aid agreements and they rely on one another. That system tends to work very well. Where I come into play for emergency response, related to emergency response, is when the everyday resources just aren't enough.

Tiffany

When a jurisdiction has something in front of them and all of their resources don't meet the needs and they have gaps, sometimes that looks like extra resources that we coordinate. Sometimes it looks like advanced planning, and often it looks like community engagement, evacuation or alerting the public. So when I talk about us or we or emergency management or the emergency operations center, that's also not just me or my very small staff day to day, which is 1 to 2 people. When we are in response mode as emergency management, that means we've activated the emergency operations center.

Tiffany

When that happens, my operations expand. They include you, Devon, the public information officer, a critical piece in county response, search and rescue from the sheriff's office, the EOC staff, which can be just county staff that has a day job and when we activate the emergency operations center, they come over and help us. We have subject matter experts. 

Tiffany

Back to it's never same twice in a row. Depending on the event, you don't know who's going to be in the emergency operations center, but that's generally how it works.

Devon

So I really appreciate the overview. Can you also talk about, from your viewpoint as the emergency manager, how Lane County specifically fits in here locally when we have incidents, whether it's wildfire, whether it’s Cascadia, whether it's dam failure or flooding or a hazardous materials spill, you know, all of those things that could happen.

Tiffany

Sure.

Devon

We’ll bring up the volcanoes in a future episode.

Tiffany

Thanks, thanks. Well, I guess I already talked about how we respond during an incident. So let me take a step back and talk about what we're doing during the regular days. The everyday days when things are working as they should. And to talk about that, it's helpful to talk about the phases of emergency management, which are preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery.

Tiffany

And, everything we do fits into one of those buckets. So, we've already talked about response, and recovery is all of the work that comes after a big event like the Holiday Farm Fire. We're still seeing projects and recovery efforts on the ground. Preparedness is trying to get people and agencies ready ahead of time, and mitigation is assigning projects to improve our environment so that the disaster doesn't hit us as hard the next time, and so that we're able to recover more swiftly and easily.

Tiffany

So, what are those things look like during preparedness phases? They look like outreach and education. They look like applying for grants and advanced planning for things that we think might happen or, or, applying improvements to processes and procedures based on the last thing that happened. We identify gaps in the system. A big part of what we do, and we actually have a new person coming on to assist with this, is exercise and training.

Tiffany

That's a preparedness measure. And that is training like we'll fight. Practicing the things that we know we  will be activating and providing and engaging and coordinating with agencies during an event. So the best way to ensure that we do that well, when the time comes, is to practice ahead of time. So training and exercise is a big part of what we do.

Devon

Yeah, it's been really great as the program has grown to see more opportunities here for our staff and our partners’ staff, local leaders to participate in training. It makes a huge difference when you walk into that room on a really bad day, and everybody's using the same words and has the same understanding of what we're there to do. It sounds so basic, but it really makes it just an incredible difference.

Tiffany

It really does. It's a, it can be an incredibly stressful environment when everything's working as it should.

Devon 

So what about response and recovery? I feel like most people can picture response, but recovery for me is just harder sort of to wrap my head around.

Tiffany

I get it. I don't think you're alone. Response is something that we see every day, and it's a word we're familiar with. Recovery is the point in an event when we begin taking action to restore to normalcy, and it actually starts before the response is over. So there's the immediate response and while that response is still going on you can see efforts to start to return to a state of normal. The definition of recovery is restoring the affected area to its previous state.

Tiffany

And that can mean so many different things. So it means restoring businesses. It means returning people to their homes, and, and starting to restore everything that that's out of whack because of the event. But therein lies the complexity. Everyone's different. We have a goal to address the whole community, meet the needs of everyone, meet them where they're at and address the realities of everyone's different lived experience, different needs.

Tiffany

And so that ends up being a really long process.

Devon

I appreciate you pointing out the recovery can be squishy because it does start while we're still also working on response. And it's not always clear: Is this thing that we're doing over here fully response or is it really recovery and how do we manage that? Because recovery takes far, far longer. Response is like a flash in the pan and recovery just sort of plods on for weeks or months or years.

Tiffany

It takes time.

Devon

Well I'm excited to have this ongoing conversation and hopefully it, you know, touches a chord in our community and does help people understand the responsibility we all have around preparedness and emergency management in general. So, what is your favorite resource for community members? If somebody really wants to get started at their home level, learning a little bit more about preparedness, where would you send them?

Tiffany

I usually start by recommending a website. It's easy to remember: Ready.gov. It comes in additional languages and it really covers everything pretty comprehensively to consider in emergency management.

Devon

I hope this first episode helps paint a picture of emergency management and previews the great things that we're going to talk about. And so along those lines, we really want to focus at first on how can we all, as people, get prepared at home right when something bad happens. And so we are going to talk about, you know, being two weeks ready and what does that really mean?

Devon

And how can people get there, right? Because not everybody has the same level of resource. Not everybody has the same level of storage space. Some families are very small, some families are very big. And so it just it looks very different for everyone. Talking about go kits, evacuation. What do you do with your pets? How about your livestock? That is an issue for us every summer as we have wildfire evacuations.

Devon

And so just really excited to bring in guests and have others join us who are really experts in those areas or have a lot of experience and talk about what that means for our community. So really, really excited about the opportunity to do this with you and with some of the partners that we work with the most.

Tiffany

I'm excited too.

Devon

We will put, some of the resources you talked about today in the show notes for people to make it easy for them to find. Until next time.

Tiffany

Thanks, Devon.

Closing

When It Hits The Fan is brought to you by Lane County Emergency Management and co-hosted by Lane County Emergency Manager Tiffany Brown and Public Information Officer Devon Ashbridge. Music is by the Love Gems. Many thanks to our listeners and guests. We are so glad you're here to help us create a more prepared community. You can find more information, including episodes and show notes, at LaneCountyOR.gov/fan. 

Sign up to receive emergency alerts at LaneAlerts.org. The views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of Lane County government.