Happy Thanksgiving! EM Speaks Webinar interviewed Pete Gaynor and Craig Fugate this week in NYC, so we’re highlighting Brock Long’s show to provide you additional content.
On our typical day of recording, we spent our time in New York City, supporting another webinar on The Readiness Lab- EM Speaks. They interviewed Pete Gaynor and Craig Fugate. We’re adding Brock Long to the conversation for a 3 dose FEMA Admin experience. Happy Thanksgiving!
This Podcast has moved to the Readiness Lab.
Host: John Scardena (0s):
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Host: John Scardena (1m 41s):
Welcome back to the show, everybody, im your hosts, John Scardena. So when we typically record, we were actually in New York City for the EM weekly. Technically the EMS speaks webinar hosted by EM weekly, Todd Devo. You know, one of our sister shows part of the Readiness Lab. You make sure you check that out, but we were out there supporting that event where Craig Fugate and Pete Gainer, former FEMA Administrators were giving their perspectives. You should make sure you look that up. It's a really great live webinar that happened that I'm sure was recorded on EM weekly. So again, check out that show, but because we were out there, we didn't have an opportunity to record a Thanksgiving week. So we're going to pull in another few, my administrator Brock Long and pull up his content from about what was it, 9, 10 months ago where you guys can check it out. It's really good. So between Craig Fugate, Pete Gainer, and Brock Long, you should have a pretty good perspective of what a few administrators have been thinking about at least from a leadership perspective and the agency perspective. I think it will be really good content for you guys. We hope you have a really good Thanksgiving. We'll see you on Friday. It's a huge episode. We're going to be talking about the Mumbai terrorist attacks because it's the 13 year anniversary with the West Point subject matter expert, who actually went there. Really great show coming up, but in the meantime, check out the show by Brock Long. We'll see on Friday Brock, welcome to the show.
Guest: Brock Long (3m 13s):
Before we go any further, you got to send me one of those t-shirts.
Host: John Scardena (3m 17s):
Done, extra large done. I'll send you two and a hat. All right. So with the Disaster Tough Podcasts, we've had just before we get into our immediate conversation, we just want to say thank you to everybody on LinkedIn, on Facebook, and our Instagram page Disaster, Tough Podcast for submitting questions. We've had so many questions. I think I kind of like 50 questions in the first day or so and tons of comments. So just thanks again for everybody who reached out all levels of the spectrum, whether you're not an emergency management, clearly you haven't basic questions, which is great, or you've been in the field for awhile and you have really specific questions for Brock. So thank you for everybody submitting a question and for Brock taking the initiative for even answering some of those questions ahead of time. So thank you so much Brock for doing that. So FEMA administrator live in the dream there, and now you're with Haggerty. So let's talk about some of your career experiences because I was actually talking to Todd Devo with the EM weekly. So if you're not listening to Todd, make sure you listen to him guys, but he was talking about how you're a true emergency manager because you were an emergency manager from day one. So can you kind of give us just a little bit of a background, especially for those who, when they hear administrator, you know, they don't know what that is right ahead of FEMA. What does that mean? So can you kind of give us your career path and what led you to where you're at now?
Guest: Brock Long (4m 41s):
Man, I have an amazing career and a quick one too. It's pretty interesting. So I went to Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and as I was finishing up graduate school, I heard one of my classmates do a paper on reforming FEMA as a result of hurricane Andrew. The gentleman at the time had, had done an internship in Wilmington, North Carolina, new Hanover county, along the coast. I was like, hey, you know, that sounds really interesting, think you could allow me that internship? So that's how I stumbled into emergency management, went to Wilmington and then physically wrote letters to state emergency management agencies and states. I thought I wanted to live in Colorado, or Georgia. One of the Virgin islands and Jordan called me back and they said, hey, we're starting.
We've got a big problem down here. We ranked number one in most violent deaths in schools and we're starting the school safety unit. We want you to come in and teach teachers how to spot weapons on kids, you know, mitigation in schools, school safety mitigation. So that was the first job I had. Funny enough, on the day I moved everything into my apartment, I moved into a category one storm surge, and then had to rush back to Atlanta because hurricane Floyd was threatening the door and it goes, and it was one of the largest evacuations in history. So I often joke that every time I changed jobs, something catastrophic happened. So, I mean, literally I interviewed with FEMA region four on the morning of 9/11, became hurricane program manager in 2004 and Florida got hit with six, you know, four major hurricanes in six weeks. In 2005, everybody, you know Katrina hit. Then literally when I became the director of Alabama emergency management agency, I got Deep Water Horizon, you know, the BPD Horizon oil spill. Then of course, you know, when we go to FEMA, we had every disaster. I mean, we even had a volcano and a hurricane at the same time, and everything else that took place.
Somebody actually commented that on linked or no, it was Instagram, Cynthia. So shout out to Cynthia. She goes, you toured all regions in 2017 and we had the most disasters, the most impactful disasters in the history of FEMA. So maybe he shouldn't tour, but my thought process on emergency management and this is going to get into like definitely personal beliefs here for a second. But you know, sometimes things are organized in a way where the most prepared person in the room gets hit by the hardest disasters. So it's interesting that you've had this career where every single time you stepped into a new role, big things happened, and maybe it's because he were supposed to be there and help out, you know, what was it? Every two or three days, every four days in FEMA, you had a new disaster or pop-up. So just talk about the complexities and I mean, just never ending breaks, right? So it's this just amazing.
Guest: Brock Long (7m 43s):
Coming into an agency where you have 21,000 employees, you know, you cover half the globe, do a lot of people don't realize you had Tinian and sack pan all the way to the burden on half the globe. So you're watching all over the place. You know, if you look at the number of disaster dollars that are going to go out as a result of this 2017 and 18 to two years, I was in office. It's more than the nine previous female administrators before me combined. What that tells me is a couple of things. One, our industry, our profession, the business model is broken, the enterprise is broken. I had to concentrate on stopping the hemorrhaging. I really believe that the post-Katrina emergency management reform set them up for failure. It turned us into my one-on-one when we're not going to fell in logistics and I get it. Failure logistics cost you your job. We don't fire anybody for a mitigation plan, by the way, we only fire you for failed in logistics. So there was a lot of work to fix that and make sure that we were able to respond to the biggest event. Well, the problem was that we were sending internal staff and that's not a capability for the Rhonda mail, small disasters. When I inherited the agency, we had a large portion of our deployable staff out in the field before Harvey hit. So you don't see these things and people don't tell you these things, John. When you walk in an office and then two months after being confirmed, Harvey Irma, Maria hits the worst California wildfire at the time. But mixed into that, I think over the two years, it was over 220 different wildfires and declared events. So something every three days, like you said, John, I mean, you got to the point where even the smallest disasters, you really didn't have time to pay attention to you. You just were basically cutting a check to those communities while you were forced on massive multi-billion dollar events.
Host: John Scardena (9m 33s):
So that makes me think of the USA ID model where they call it a, a gift well card where they do, I think it's 50,000, it's pretty small. But what do you think about the idea of switching over to that kind of model where if it's under a certain threshold, you say, okay, we're just going to write you a check to the state and you take care of it where we can really pull back and work on that strategic level or the true national security incidents.
Guest: Brock Long (10m 2s):
Yeah. So we started to looking at analysis. It was like, why are we deploying all these people in the field for small disasters? Look, I have to be careful, a disaster is catastrophic. The definition of a catastrophic disaster is in the eye of the beholder. If you are a homeowner and you are uninsured and lost everything that's catastrophic. But when you sit in the FEMA administrator seat and you start looking at the data and you realize that 50% of the disasters that you declare a less than seven and a half million dollars, we've got to move past that. That's where you cut a check. Most of the work is reimbursing the loss of public infrastructure that was uninsured, which is another moral hazard. We need to come back to John. Then if you start looking at doing an even deeper dive, 80% of the disasters that FEMA declares is less than $41 million at the time I was in office. So it got to the point where we were saying, how do we not send a ton of staff down to run the disaster on behalf of the local and state government? How do we get the grants or the influence of state and local governments to bring up their capability, to manage the $41 million in less disaster so that we can concentrate on the big ones, you know, and FEMA was spending more money on overhead for the smaller disasters. Then we were putting out grant dollars to fix the problem. That's a bad business model that is not sustainable. I really believe John, that if a FEMA was a car engine, we've been red lining as soon as Harvey hit, right? We've never really recovered the static patterns in some of you guys, I mean, you were, I'm out west. You know, some of these FCO’s, hadn't been home since 2017 and that's not doable either. So we have to rethink how we manage disasters in the future. I believe there's a correct formula for that. It's not a bigger FEMA man. We tried bigger FEMA after Andrew in 92 after Katrina. You know, we're going to continue to pile more on FEMA's plate on the non Stafford Disaster Act category because the public health arena needs to be reformed, not FEMA bigger. Adding more to FEMA is not the answer. Adding more to FEMA's plate right now is going to really penalize the agency on being able to respond to the natural disaster world. You know?
Host: John Scardena (12m 16s):
Yeah. You just said so many things that I want to touch on, man. That was an incredible statement that is, about red lining, for sure. My thought process is from the guy who worked in DC and also worked out in the field and seeing the differences there, you're right, every disaster at the local level is catastrophic. When you lose your home and you don't have insurance, even if you do have insurance, I don't want to lose my home. Right. So this thought process of disaster tough behind me came from, I'm a big words guy lately, and resiliency has its place. Because you do want to bounce back if something happens, but at the same time, I don't want to have a disaster. How do you become a little bit tougher? What I have found is mitigation is everything. If you can mitigate disaster, if it's not impacting people or infrastructure, then you're way ahead of the game and rewarding people who want to do that. You know, we should really look at those complexities there because why are we not rewarding people for mitigating? Why are we stretching these sources to the max?
Guest: Brock Long (13m 30s):
Yeah, John, well, first of all, the whole disaster declaration process, as I said, needs to be reconfigured and is a moral hazard. We reward communities largely and FEMA's most expensive expenditure over time is fixing uninsured, public buildings and the contents within them. Okay. If you want to reduce disaster costs, then you start to force these communities. These self-insured communities to get reinsurance or insurance on their public facilities, because you're the taxpayer paying for them not to put insurance in place, which is the first line of defense, not only for governments, but also for you, John, a citizen that owns a home or a business. Because of that, FEMA's disaster dollars are exponentially increasing and we're picking, we're throwing tons of taxpayer dollars, three worth for that, instead of just saying, well, the disaster is so big. We should raise the normal disaster cost share from 75/25 cents, FEMA pay's 75%, the local and state governments pay 25%. We should raise it to 90/10 because the disaster is so big. What if we built incentives in to where we only lower the disaster costs to 80 or 90/10 or a hundred percent because that community has demonstrated over a three to five-year period, real money into mitigating their infrastructure, implementing land use planning, implementing proper building codes and residential codes. Then we start to reduce the cost share over time. What you do is is that you make a disaster declaration more expensive than actually having insurance in place and mitigation in place so that you start to force that a little bit.
Right now I just, I believe it. It's not only mitigation John. Is what are we training citizens to do and be prepared? Is a be ready campaign working? In my opinion, that's not, you know, I love the people that are behind it and they work truly hard inside FEMA to do this, but come on. What are the tangible skills John that are needed? When's the last time you've done CPR? If you haven't done CPR in the last three years, what you know is dated. Unfortunately Americans look around at somebody else to know CPR. When's the last time you sat down with a financial advisor, John, to understand how to learn, how to retire and become financially resilient. Only 1% of Americans meet with a financial advisor every year. I would rather you take your money instead of buying a supply kit for three to five days, I would rather you take that money and go sit down with a financial adviser and learn financial resilience and insurance and insurance.
Host: John Scardena (16m 2s):
I had this video that we made, I don't know, maybe a year ago now, just to help people like general public, especially when they were, when COVID was starting up. Geez, a year ago now. Yeah. I said, the number one thing you do in a disaster when you're hit by disaster, personally is not to tell Facebook, it is to call your insurance company. Like just understanding how these systems work and getting on these lists so that you can recover faster. The whole idea is to get back to normal, as fast as humanly possible. You're talking about building codes. I spent several years in Japan, especially impacted by the 2011 earthquake tsunami, Fukushima disaster. I look at their building codes in Japan and the earthquake, the 9.0 earthquake wasn't a disaster, it was a tsunami. And why is that building codes? Why is an Arizona, they're starting to put commercial sprinklers on new residential buildings, wildfires, why are these things not standard across the United States to help resiliency reduce the level of impact to people?
Guest: Brock Long (17m 10s):
Why do appraisers in this country evaluate your home the same as another person's home? Despite the fact that you've dumped, you've elevated it properly, you've put, you know, hurricane resistant glass in it, you've done the mitigation, you put a generator in there, but yet we're only going to appraise your home based on location and square footage and the number of veterans. In some cases, it's not just a government, I'm not a believer in government solutions. We can get into the vaccine on the that. We need to be using a normal logistical private sector, supply chains to get this vaccine in the arms of Americans, not a hundred percent government solution. So when you look at this even down to the mitigation, if you want to create change, then you got to change the narrative of, hey realtors.
Guest: Brock Long (17m 58s):
You know, any house can flood, despite whether the fact you're in a flood zone or not. So encourage it, hey, appraisal, you know, the appraiser industry, I mean, come on, step up and start mitigating these, you know. How does it or mitigate it are more valuable than the ones that aren't and reward the people when they sell their home, you know, have that fact, and so it's not as what can seem to do. But on that, I went to Congress, I think, eight times to testify and I had numerous meetings behind the scenes to create the dialogue behind the DRRA, and eventually the break program was started to really focus on pre-disaster mitigation. Now as a result, I think you've already seen the bottom industry coming in and boasting about 10 billion, being available for climate adaptation and different things. Well, that's because of the DRRA and the Brick funding was made available. But he can't just be that famous solution. It has to be down to the city county manager and the realtor at the grassroots level, protecting their community and their book of business.
Host: John Scardena (19m 1s):
Yeah. There's the Pomo Indians here in California, they actually just reached out to me a couple of weeks ago about creating a public safety, power shutoff plan. That comes out of that Brick Grant. So these communities are now are starting to look at these, these reservations or even communities that on their, what their own dollars say might have not been able to do something. But now with grants, they are able to actually look at problems and overcome those problems. I thought that was great that they were being proactive. They sought out the grant, they're trying to find a vendor. Maybe it's me, maybe it's somebody else, but they're trying to get these things in place for themselves so that they're, they are able to look at their vulnerable populations, say, okay, we're going to take care of you. That that's everything. I created a hazard vulnerability assessment for our home. You know, I did planning and then I did ops and then I went into GIS, which is the most bizarre career path you could possibly imagine. But I really learned to like the purpose of analytics. So when we went to buy our home, I looked at 36 natural and man-made disasters that could happen to our home. I looked at critical infrastructure. I looked at all these different things and we just had a major windstorm in here in California. 90% of our neighborhood was without power for three or four days. 10% of the neighborhood had power because we were on a different grid. Thankfully, my wife, it was like a proud moment. We were sitting there with the lights on. She goes, I'm so glad four years ago, you gave that document to our realtor and say, here's what we'll live. This is where we won't live based off of all these different parameters. It wasn't doomsday prepper stuff. It was just like, oh, power lines under the ground, or being on the same grid as a hospital, or here's a flood plain. We don't want to live even close to a flood plain. And so just like putting these imprint, these parameters in place, and quite frankly, that stuff should be standard. Hazard vulnerability assessment for realtors should be standard.
Guest: Brock Long (21m 3s):
You know, you may recall, I can't remember if you were with FEMA during the front, you know, the shutdown and everything else. One of the biggest problems that we have that is increasing the impact of disasters, is asset poverty, not income, poverty of where I don't make enough money to make ends meet, but asset poverty, where you may make six figures, but you're so highly leveraged because you drive the right car and you live in the right house. Then you cut back on insurance and you're living paycheck to paycheck, even though you make a ton of money. You know, the bottom line is that we see that is killing FEMA. I think FEMA has got to partner with the department of education. And it's great that we put an emphasis on math and science and our education we're arena, but we've got to go back and teach the fundamentals of how money works and how insurance works and just tangible life skills, not only in the department of energy, but providing those skills, access to those skills in depressed neighborhoods or not really depressed neighbor, all neighborhoods across America, because everybody is impacted. It's something that we saw take place. I think that FEMA, when you look at the health of the community, we've got to start looking at data differently. If you can see the comprehensive credit score of the community that I live in, what I often want to know is, is that comprehensive credit score going down over a five-year period, or is it going up? If it's going down, then you have more Homeland security problems. You have less sales tax and income tax revenue, which means greater demand or government service with less means to pay for it. You're going to have food deserts. You're going to have more likelihood of, you know, less ownership and a community, more civil to services, whatever it may be. So if we recognize that, then how do we get that going into the next level direction of going back up and it's through, you know, grassroots community outreach and education and access to the education on how insurance and finances work.
I mean, don't be dependent on the government for your retirement, John. I mean, he'll sit down with, you know, an advisor, which is a free meeting and learn how to do it, and that's where I think we've lost that. We've lost the tangible skills of letting the homeowner, letting you the citizen, whether it's an active shooter of or hurricane, you are the true first responders. If you're looking around waiting for, let's just say the police or FEMA to bail you out after disaster, you're way behind. If you look at some of the FBI statistics, like on active shooter events, over half these events are going to begin and end before police even arrived. So are you training your business? You know, the staff of your business are you training the staff of your government office on what actions to take, to try to reduce the impact of those types of events.
It's the same. We see it time and time again. If you look at like what we saw in harvest 80% of the households that flooded were, you know, not insured who did insure their homes, got about an average of $117,000 to recover, versus those who weren't got about three to $6,000 from FEMA to recover. That's the Testament. Insurance is the first line of defense. Any house can flood and you got to make insurance a priority in your budget.
Host: John Scardena (24m 19s):
I remember going out into the field and hurricane Harvey. I have a funny story where you, you have a ton of credit and I've been giving you credit. And I haven't, I've never even told you this story. So I'm about to tell you a cool story, but I was out in the field and there was a community where I was serving these homes for data collection. They lived next to the city dump. We're talking like fence line, city dump, and it was breaking my heart, you know, and you see these people who have nothing, and they had nothing before the disaster, and you're looking at the properties and you don't know if there was a storm that caused the damage or if it was like that beforehand. We have a problem here, where we need to address how to help people out, truly recover, not getting back to normal because it's getting back to normal. It just makes you just as vulnerable. That drives me nuts, to be honest about FEMA, get returned to normal. You're just as vulnerable as you were, if you returned to exactly as it was. If it's a hurricane or a natural disaster, it's predictable. It's going to happen there again, it's a weather. I mean, it's not, it's not like a black Swan event. So we have to do much, much better in our field about incentivizing and encouraging people at any level of the property or wealth spectrum to if they are impacted by disaster, to make sure that they're not impacted by disaster. Again, I want to tell you this story because it's kinda funny. I like to say I cheated is kind of funny. So in hurricane Harvey, you send out a memo saying, be innovative. We're stretched to the max. We have three hurricanes, all this stuff is happening. Be innovative. FCO took that and sent it out to the unit leaders across the team and said, if you have an innovative solution that will help do it and, you know, ethical and all those, all those things. So I went over to legal and I said, I want a drone. And they're like, what? I'm like, I want a drone. I can get data so much faster with so much less resources. Everybody, I get a thousand Cessna’s up in the air who take a half a million photos and they all suck. We were manually going through those. Those are terrible. We can, we can do better as satellites are not getting the images that we need. And so legal helped me to, to navigate that system. We got drone, we coordinate with FAA, we did the whole deal. Then I got deployed to the fires out in California. They were complaining about not getting the right aerial imagery because the Reaper drone, even though it, it flies and it can see infrared where the fire's at, which is really helpful. Obviously, sometimes if it's flying at an angle, you're seeing me on YouTube right now. It appears that the fires between that and the home. So it looks like the home was on fire. So how many homes really are on fire? So they're like, we just want to get better imagery. So our team was like, well, this guy has a drone. I go perfect. So coordinated with everybody, air FAA, the whole deal got out there and myself and one other person, 2017, we found 30 more homes than a 33 person PDA team. We did it in a third amount of time at almost no cost. Think how much cost it is to deploy that many people. More importantly, we saved several homes because the Reaper Joan had marked several homes destroyed being on fire. We were to prove that the fire had actually burned the home and stopped at the property line, shout out to those firefighters.
So you fast forward three or four years, the SOP now is to have civil air patrol, flying drones to collect data for FEMA one. That's awesome. So thanks for helping me out with that, but the other problem is it's, it goes back to the same oh, we're just going to collect all the images we can. If I want amateur pilots to get out there and get a beautiful picture of the sunset around damage. Great. No, no, no. Mark to the civil air patrol for that, but you need trained people who can get out there and get information as fast as humanly possible to recover as fast as possible. It's just that whole declaration processes a crapshoot.
Guest: Brock Long (28m 30s):
Yes, sir. So John, you know, funny enough, I mean, I think I recall I had a data put together by the individual assistance guys inside FEMA to say, hey, look, you know how many knots, if you are a homeowner and uninsured and you lose your home or whatever else, how many knocks at the virtual door would you get for all the assistance comes out. And it was something like 14 knocks at the door. Okay, you're going to get 14 knocks in the door. You're going to get local NGO’s you're going to get local government. You're going to get code enforcement. You're going to get all these different knocks all the way up to FEMA, instead of doing all these damage assessments and, you know, and, and trying to understand everything, how do we get it down to one knock in a system that cuts across all of us, whoever that's going to be, you know how they're rewarded one day, if you can get it down to one knock that says, if you enter this data into the homeowner, it can come across the NGO, the private sector and the public sector, or whatever, to help that individual, you know, you know, so there, there is tons of room for innovation. One of the things that we do here is, you know, right now, you know, please, if you're an ICS, the questions popping up about ICS, it's time to graduate from ICS. I love lights and sirens. I love response. You know, I love that, but it's the shortest phase of what we do in emergency manager, right? And you need ICS, it as is a staple of our profession, but you know what I need right now, you know, with Haggerty consulting, I need people that understand disaster cost, recovery, grants, management, and project management. I do not need an ICS, and that's not a slack debate. There might be a time where I need you, John, is that ICS guru.
But when you think about the complexities of what is, I mean, FEMA faces an impossible. Everybody thinks, well, FEMA, the recovery's going so bad. It’s FEMA’s fault, its FEMA’s fault. No, no, no. If you look at the three disaster relief on supplementals that were passed as a result of Harvey, Irma, Marie, the money went to 20 different federal government agencies to fund over 91 different recovery programs across the federal government. Now you can fast forward to COVID all of the CRF funding, new programs being in policy being created on the fly. But yet you still got the long-term recovery of Harvey, Irma, Maria, and all these wildfires, couple of the trillions of dollars coming down, we don't need incident commanders right now. We need people that know how to teach a community. What you're entitled to, how to sequence the funding that's you're entitled to together so that you avoid duplication and use it in a manner to not only recover, but also become more resilient. Absolutely. But the problem is, is that because of the legislation that was passed after 9/11 and the inputs that was put on the grants is we put such a focus on ICS after 9/11 and Katrina that the law is there. We're still focusing on our training efforts, you've gotta be NIMS compliance and getting Rocky funding. So that results in FEMA, training, more police officers and ICS, than we do an emergency management like the numbers, the business doesn't even make sense on this. So we've got to step back from that and let these grants from Homeland security, there should be a review on Homeland security grants every three years that says, is this realistic and more because a lot of the grant guidance that's put out or the law that established the UASII funding and everything else haven't transformed to understand cybersecurity, you know? And so there's a lot of innovation that needs to take place and an innovation and adaptation to what's going on.
Host: John Scardena (32m 13s):
Well, here's the problem though, with our industry. Maybe you can kind of answer this because what I find now, like I said, I'm kind of more of the data guy. Now, I'm looking for ways to actually change the field. I'm doing that through the podcast or interview interviewing people, which is great, but I actually want to find real solutions. I want to be able to say, here's all the training, here's all the mitigation you need to do so you don't have disaster. Hurricane rolls in, you can punch it right in the face and say, we're fine. You know, but here's the problem, like the reality is we have a huge portion of our field and traditionally, this would just be more correct. You have retired fire and police who get in there and say, well, I'm retired cops so we're going to focus on active shooter. I'm, you know, firefighters, so we're going to focus on evacuations. Now we're having these conflicting generations where people like you and me who are emergency managers and understand like the whole spectrum of emergency management. How do you combat we need to be innovative with, we found solutions that work, and we've always done it like this. How do you combat we've always done it like this?
Guest: Brock Long (33m 20s):
Well, I think the Congress and the oversight committees within Congress needs to make sure that the agency and Homeland security is allowed to evolve with threats to changing threats. Okay. The other thing is, is that you got to go through and scrub the agency of legacy programs that really don't have the biggest bang for the buck anymore. I mean, you know, there's all these legacy items that have been thrown into FEMA that we're running just based on old law and past disasters that happened 10, 15, 20 years ago that we need to go back and say, is this really necessary? So part of it is, there's a strong partnership with FEMA, but here's the thing, John, we've got to stop looking at FEMA as the end all be all answer to all our problems. Like I said, we tried bigger FEMA after Andrew. We've tried bigger FEMA after Katrina. Everybody wants a bigger FEMA after Maria. That's not the answer. I love FEMA. I love the agency alone, gold and art and people within it. But the problem is, is that I equate it to a chair. And I don't know if you've heard me use this or not, but imagine the terror four legs, the first leg on that chair is a prepared citizenry, a true culture of preparedness within our citizenry that does not exist. CPR, resiliency, proper insurance to, you know, not putting your business in vulnerable areas unless you've mitigated that business. The second chair has a strong state and local government, you know, true capability is their capability also growing.
In far too often, I hear well, budgets are tight. You know, budgets are cut back. Well, mother nature doesn't care about that John. So maybe the budget guys in these local communities need to start really going through and understanding what their true priorities and part of it is going to be protecting their citizens from natural disasters. So stop your enemy, a bellyache excuse as to why you're not taking their emergency management local governments take seriously. The third leg is the public private sector partnership and what we've tried to be innovative. There was through the community life lines. You know, FEMA doesn't control your destiny. We know nothing about turning the power back on in Puerto Rico. One, we didn't let the power grid rod over in two decade period. You know, but everybody wants us to get the power back on. It's not the federal electricity management agency. Well, who owns that power grid? If you look at who owns the power grid, where you are in California, it's the private sector. Well, we don't control the private sector, but 85% of the infrastructure that you depend on to run your Snapchats to your flip, the lights on is owned by the private sector. So in that public private sector partnership, that third leg, we've got to reconfigure our plans of saying, hey, John, you know, man, you run the power company what do you need from me to get the lights back on? And it can be, well, I need you to move debris from these areas so that I can access my, you know, my community. I need a place for my workers to stay or live. You know, I need a base camp. I need whatever we've got to change. The focus that we are not the incident commander. We don't controls squat when it comes to the destiny. In my opinion, no, we control some elements like search and rescue and those types of things. But the bigger element is, we've got to rethink that public private sector partnership. That's what we tried to do in the innovation community. Lifelines, the fourth leg is a part of our FEMA. What's, what's the right balance for FEMA. How do you set them up for success in the future, John? I mean, quite frankly, we're going to continue to add to it. Now we're going to say, hey, you got to go do COVID points of dissemination, you know, and all this other stuff or whatever, and it's like, we keep adding to it and the dartboard keeps moving. They just can't be, you know, successful. It's never going to be able to meet the demands of what's there. We've got to set up realistic expectations.
Here's the thing, in all four phases of preparedness from, you know, preparedness mitigation, response and recovery. Those four phases need to grow with a fifth one prevention. If all four of those legs are attached to that chair and the seat, your community is the seat. And that chair is pretty stable. But if you go into a disaster like we did in Louisiana during Katrina or Puerto Rico during Maria, and there's only one leg of that chair there, and it's called FEMA, it's never going to go well and everybody's going to be upset. Then you're going to have people saying that, you know, there's disparities in the response or whatever else. I would argue that FEMA has to work overtime and doubly hard on the Marias of the world and the Katrinas of the world when there is no prepared citizenry, there is no real strong state and local government. There is no real meaningful public private sector partnership. Again, on the public private sector partnership, it’s not, what can Walmart do for FEMA? It is what can the emergency management industry do to redesign their plans, training, and exercise, to make sure that, you know, the privately owned infrastructure is coming up in unison. We see it all the time. John, you know, you'll have the power company fixing one sector of the community and the communications industry is fixing another sector, the community, you know, their part. They're not even talking to each other because we've never set up a private sector, infrastructure branch. That led to the ESF 14 cross-sector community, you know, community infrastructure, coordination, you know what I mean?
Host: John Scardena (38m 24s):
So you're saying we're all screwed. That's pretty much, it's funny. So let me back up here for a second because you're bringing up some really good, good points. I think emergency managers like myself are just, I mean, you're hitting on all pistons here. You're hitting our pain points. I had a friend who's in Puerto Rico and they said that when they, when they deployed and they weren't even the first team deployed, so we won't even do that old mess, but they got there and Puerto Rico was like, okay, what are you doing? And they were like, well what's your plan. Like we don't have a plan. This is what you guys are supposed to do. So there was like, there was absolutely zero understanding of what FEMA does. So there's a resilience, there's a messaging problem. There a training problem there. You're talking about critical infrastructure and using those public partner, private partnerships, full-scale exercises, I've been to several national level exercises. I've also been to state and even local. I have rarely seen if ever those, the outside of like maybe a couple of low ads, maybe red cross has involved maybe a couple others. But if you have electric companies involved, if you have these other companies involved who have a stake in the game, and so they understand what's going on there’s the other very real problem though.
One problem I've been absolutely trying to address and trying to overcome here is that nobody communicates the emergency manager, that term manager is a misnomer. It's false. We're supposed to be emergency coordinators that best, the best emergency coordinator in the world is somebody who says here's, everybody's involved. It's supposed to be involved, get them all into the same room, make sure that they're not arguing or competing with interests. That the fact that states were out trying to outbid each other for COVID is just fricking mind-boggling to me. First of all. I know people right now who in FEMA, who are deployed to help out with the COVID dispensary of the vaccine. It's like, dude, you are not a public health expert. I know some loggies who are phenomenal, who can do supply chain management, but, why are we adding more to the plate to people who don't have this background? I did Ebola response as part of the National Cancer Institute. I understand the pandemic response and trying to get a stop pandemic response. But I had a specific background to that. Why are people who don't have a background to that, or don't have a scientific background to that, focusing on that. So adding things more to the plate, it's just absurd. Anyways.
Guest: Brock Long (41m 3s):
Let's talk about COVID for a sec. There's a lot of confusion. Let me ask you John, real quick. What's the difference between the CDC, HHS and IH, Asper, public health, state public health, who actually is in charge? Then you've got a white house task force, or are you going to look, you know, whatever, who do we listen to a second question? What's the qualification of a local public health official?
Host: John Scardena (41m 28s):
What's the qualification of an emergency manager?
Guest: Brock Long (41m 31s):
A lot of times it's a medical doctor, medical doctors, my dad and my sister are both medical doctors. I love them to death. They ain't know nothing about logistics. I know nothing about the science piece of it, but they would, the whole public health industry was never designed to run a pandemic and it's unrealistic the way that the planning structure has been put forward. So there's a couple of things that have to happen. If you want to give pandemic to FEMA, then you need to outfit them and you need to consolidate all these public health entities that most Americans are confused by. Okay. Two, it was a total breakdown in my opinion of the health and medical community lifeline that we identified John. It's not just, when you think of mitigation, it's not just brick and mortar, and we've got to adapt to sea level rise. It is mitigating critical supply chains. Okay. That you don't own it, FEMA, by the way. So when you think about the COVID event, total breakdown in private sector cost, supply chains, one hospitals don't store more than a week to two weeks worth of supplies. They depend on just-in-time logistics. They've never done continuity planning around their vendors that supply them, the bigger vendors that supply every hospital unfortunately have sold, you know, a lot of their contracts out, you know, to China, Malaysia. When you look at all the PPE, before we get into this, we created a strategic national stockpile that was never designed to handle a pandemic.
It was more of a biological chemical attack on a big city. But what we've done is is that our supply chains for war fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan for PPE and medical supplies to what we're facing now was completely dependent on private sector, on supply chains. Then the government panics and says, activate the DPA, get FEMA involved. Boom. And then FEMA is faced with this fact. I try to bring it up in a manner to relate to people that aren't in this industry. It's like, you know, John, imagine if you owned a cookie store and your first order was for 700 million cookies, you've got to coordinate that. You've got to make sure that the cookie doesn't rot and you think about everything that goes into that. It's so much more than the federal government and going forward. What I don't like is that we're not setting up realistic battle rhythms in our industry. Now for the future, this virus is going to be with us. We need to start going back to the private sector, to the Walmarts of the, you know, the CVS is in Walmarts and the Amazons of the world or the private medical providers and saying, all right, how do we open up these normal privately owned supply chains to get this shot in your arm rather than FEMA, DOD, you know, government options. There's got to be handoff and, or never going to get ahead and win that game.
Host: John Scardena (44m 19s):
All right. So you, again, you're bringing up so many points here, we could probably have you on a hundred times and talk about all this stuff, but let's talk about some of these solutions because we've identified several of the gaps and you've suggested several solutions already. But what I want to do, thinking about that local emergency manager, or the emergency managers for organizations, schools, campuses, that kind of level, I want you, I wanted to be able to have your advice to them as well, because what you're talking about is everything that at the federal level can impact you at the local level. So you need to become much more resilient or my, my opinion, tough against disasters. So how do you do that? Let's talk about a couple of use cases based off of some of the questions, again, that we got offline. Like some of the questions where we're really focused on that local emergency manager, you're just starting on the field and you got hit by COVID or, you know what? My first disaster was FEMA was hurricane Matthew. I was put as the GI UL there and I was like, okay, here we go. So what do you do when you get that 700 million order of cookies as an, as a new owner? Let's kind of start with that, well, so like, step 1, 2, 3, what do you think you should be doing as number two mantra right now?
Guest: Brock Long (45m 42s):
As an emergency manager right now, let's see. Well, there's a couple things. One let's back up. If you're a new emergency manager getting into the field, you need to learn how to write operationally because there are not enough planners right now. They can plan on the fly for doing points of dissemination to whatever is needed to, you need to learn project management skills. So these universities that are in disaster, emergency management, you know, curriculum, I need project management professionals, you know, as much as I need, you know, people that understand all elements of emergency management. To knowing what I know now, if it had landed on my plate, I would have called it in the big boys. I wouldn't call it in the Medlines of the world, the Cardinals, the big medical distributors, and I would have called him the big, you know, Maderna’s and those to come in to say, you got to tell me how to operate these, these privately owned community. You know, these privately owned supply chains. You don't get a flu shot by the government every year. You get a flu shot and largely because of the private sector. So how do we duplicate that except exponentially bigger. Then the other thing John is, you know, going back to the whole, you got to get 700 million cookies out for your first order is how you set the expectation of citizens, right? So here, again, the information is all over the place. Social media is less than accurate, and we can come back to that. And a lot of a third of it's influenced by foreign actors. Okay. That, that make us look stupid. You know, too, there are too many cooks in the kitchen when it comes to who's in charge. What is the ultimate, what kind of mask do I need? You know, like the guidance is coming out and in the hurricane world, I will tell you as John Q citizen, if we were going to issue an evacuation, you need to listen to the local emergency management director who is putting out the warning order guidance. Well, that's not the case here. It's very top down, it's coming from a white house czar, or the CDC or HHS, and not a local public health official who was not prepared to handle this pandemic. I mean, because they've got a big day job as it is, you know, pandemic planning is not one of their things that they sat around and talked about on Monday morning staff meetings, right? So we've got to go back and reconfigure, but you've got to set the expectations of citizens of saying, here's what we're trying to do and it's going to be a while in the meantime, do these three things, not 15 things, not 20 things, but do these three things.
Host: John Scardena (48m 16s):
Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. There's no such thing as plan B. I think what served me best in FEMA specifically, was that I had learned the skill to prioritize. Things, get left, let let go of, things fall to the side, you can't do everything. I think that is why I was able to talking from a career perspective, be able to propel myself to the point where I felt like if I said something that meant something, and I think that'd be the other point of advice to emergency managers out there is learn to prioritize as fast as possible. We talked about project management is going to be a little bit of a plug here, but we endorse Futurity IT because I was looking at some of their, some of their products and they have a product called Athena again, plug here. So take it as you will. But they designed an app that's like really intuitive. Tt's specifically project management for emergency managers. So the whole thing's customizable and it's task tracking. If you look at most of project management, it's designed by tech companies who like do agile or do these other type of waterflow methodologies where it's all about fail fast, and it's all about dollars. But for emergency managers on the blue sky stuff, like your day to day, you need to be able to learn what's happening. What's most important. So when you're in a disaster, you're able to say here's 1, 2, 3. I have to get these done, or I fail. So plug there.
Guest: Brock Long (49m 52s):
Yeah. So if you're a local emergency manager right now, and you're drowning staff wise, there is no reason for you to be drowning staff wise right now with COVID and natural disasters. Because one of the things that we did with say the DRA is we increased the management cost provision so that you could hire force account labor, or you could hire a consulting firm like us to come in and augment your response staff so that you can go back to your day job or manage or the cost recovery piece of understanding what you're entitled to after, you know, CRF supplemental comes out or whatever. So some states are incredibly well, everybody's going at it a little differently, but there's one state that we are working with that has, has put forward over a billion dollars in public assistance funding. Well, the management cost provisions attached to that would allow that state to hire probably 122 full time employees for two years, but nobody's teaching them this. They're all looking around and where's, where's FEMA, staff, where's state staff, whatever. There's no reason for you to have a staff shortage. You look at the, some of the money that just came out from the treasury emergency rental assistance program. 10% management cost provision. Every state spending a minimum of 200 million. Some states are getting like 2 billion, and we're saying management costs to hire the infrastructure or the spot of systems. You need to manage the disaster. And we don't teach that. We teach people preliminary damage assessments. We teach people the ICS, but we do not teach emergency managers how to take advantage of the management cost provisions. And it was strategic in the DRRA to get the management cost to 5% and 7% at the local and state level. For a reason, I did not have any more staff I could deploy for the $41 million in less disaster. You need to go use your management cost provisions to hire force account labor, or the private sector consulting firms that knows it. But yet there's this, sometimes government looks badly upon the consulting firms that are out there when actually they can help you out tremendously.
Host: John Scardena (52m 08s):
Well, you just showed your value. I mean, obviously a value is an emergency manager to Haggerty, but you just showed your value value there as well, because you're able to go in there and tell these states, hey, we can actually help you do this. We can do this for a couple of years. And so my, my biggest thing is just the bureaucracy is good because it weeds out some of the stupid. But at the same time, like it makes it really hard for an emergency manager. I bet there's emergency managers right now that lists listened to you and said what who've been killing themselves for a year who are exhausted. I've had so many people text me, call me what are friends across the United States who are just exhausted. It's like, dude, I need a way out. Like I can't sustain this. Like mentally, physically I'm done. So what you just said, right there is like one hire Haggerty, which probably people should do. But also like as, as a consulting firm, you can say, I can help supplement you. The dollars are already there. We're not adding to your budget. Like that's the whole whole deal right now is to help people figure out how can I add, how could I be a plus one to you without costing a plus one? You just call that out. So I'm going to make that a clip for part of the show because people need to hear that. But now you're saying some really good stuff there. All right. So let's, let's switch topics here a little bit, because I'm going to read a couple of questions here, if that's okay with you. Maybe we'll one on that mark. So here we go. Emily says, so you, you kind of called this out, but let's talk about more of a general sense with FEMA maybe. What states make the best use of their own funds, the federal funds?
Guest: Brock Long (53m 55s):
Do you have like a top?
Host: John Scardena (53m 57s):
Yeah. What states are most resilient on to, to emergency management?
Guest: Brock Long (54m 3s):
That's tough to see. I can tell you what four states get the most money. Historically, it's New York, Florida, Texas, and California. And you know, and then it goes back to that successful once the successful formula of emergency management, those four states have very strong, state level emergency management agencies and, and many widely respected local emergency management agencies as a result of the money that they get and experience that they've been through. I think other states can look to see how they're designed and how you can duplicate that on a reduced level to some degree. But those are the four states that historically get the most amount of money and are most self-sufficient in these cases. But when they, when they can't handle the big ones, they call in people, the consulting firms to be able to come in or hire force, count labor to augment their capabilities. Now, there are some small states that do tremendously. Well. I mean, you know, you've got not small states, but medium sized states, you know, Maryland, North Carolina, there's some in my home state does a tremendous job. You know, they're off the radar screen from Texas and Florida and those types of things, but they've been hit with a lot and you know, and managers are managing a lot as well. So there's a lot of good states. And then there's some that probably don't do it as well that I will keep to myself. There were definitely some squeaky wheels out there that, you know, you're just banging your head against the desk saying, yes, we'll come in and do it for you.
Host: John Scardena (55m 40s):
Yeah. It gets back into a loop. I've definitely deployed to some of those states. I could talk about that forever, which I won't. But what would happen is I would get in there and they get stuck in this rut of, we don't have the money, the personality type, maybe lack of training, whatever. They start to find all these excuses and then that just perpetuates. They don't ever try to find a way out. They don't find a way to break that loop and doing any one of those things will help break that loop. New, fresh blood in there would help trying to access grant dollars or getting somebody in there to do some training would help. So I would go there as a national IMAT guy, again, talking about FEMA day specifically, and I would start trying to help build relationships where relationships weren't. I felt a lot of my job actually was relationship building just between FEMA and state at learning what they could provide. I'm like, holy crap, that shouldn't happen in a disaster, but it happened a lot, unfortunately.
Guest: Brock Long (56m 50s):
That was the whole purpose of a FEMA integration teams to the state level. You know, FEMA that I recognized very quickly and throughout my experience, that I've always thought that FEMA's customer service business concepts were broken. Now think about this. I mean, when did you see somebody from FEMA? If you're the local emergency manager, probably at a conference, maybe at a regional, you know, meeting here or there, but largely, you know, a majority of local emergency managers never see FEMA until the recovery phase when everything's blown up and tensions are high. Right? So the whole purpose of the FEMA integration teams was twofold and hopefully there'll be continued.
One, why can't I embed staff? We're like one of the only federal government agencies that doesn't have state level offices all over the place like the FBI, or they even have them in big cities. You know, why can't we go out and work day in and day out, on the planning, training and exercise side with you said, and then when you get hit, I know exactly what you need. I understand how you bring in resources or what, where your gaps are. I often thought that the whole hazard identification risk assessment process was a major liability to FEMA because and Homeland security, because you were, you were requesting, hey, what are your gaps, John? What are your gaps? Well, my question when I was in office was, well, how, what are we doing to overcome those gaps? Okay. Each one of them was different. You know, somebody can say housing, somebody could say pandemic planning, somebody could say whatever. And so the 15 was, here's what your report said. I'm going to send you a housing specialist and a logistics person. What else do you want? You know, from that standpoint, and let's help you overcome those gaps. But OMB, the office of management budget fought me tooth and nail, basically trying to argue that I was doing the job or the state and local governments. It wasn't about that. I don't want to do the state and local government's job. I wanted to basically build a strong relationship as you said earlier, we are coordinators. We are communicating, we are collaborators to build teams to overcome problems.
Host: John Scardena (58m 56s):
So here's a personal question then. I asked this to Todd to vote again. I gave, I promise I'll give him a shout out. So that's the second shout out. That's it? That's how you get tapped. But I liked Todd a lot too. That's why I'm willing to do it, but this is the question. CEM certified emergency manager, I am not a fan of the CEM, and I'm gonna get a lot of pushback on that because to be honest, it's, it's pretty low level of like, I don't really trust somebody if they have their CEM. I can't trust their, if they're battle-hardened or not, but why doesn't FEMA get into that game? We had like the practitioner course, we have EMI. We have all these different things. Why won't FEMA actually come out and say, we are going to create a standardization of, if I get into a community, all county emergency managers have a grant to be able to go and take this course to be able to get certified state guys, the whole deal and start working through an academy that way.
Guest: Brock Long (59m 54s):
Yeah. So first of all, as a CEM, I'm all for accreditations and people, you know, continuing education and, and reaching a standard. No doubt about it. You know, and I met with IAEM several times regarding the CEM, I would like to see there be more operational, you know, logistics and qualifications that are there. I think that they can continue to evolve, but I'll be honest with you. Like, let's step way back. One of the things that if I could have stayed eight years at FEMA and gutted it out, and one of the most dynamic times to ever serve your country and I say that laughingly, you know. If I could have been there eight years, I would have totally exploded the entire hiring process at FEMA, not to say that we don't have great people inside
Host: John Scardena (1h 0m 41s):
The hiring process sucks.
Guest: Brock Long (1h 0m 45s):
But here's what we do at FEMA. So they advertise the individual positions, we need a mitigator, we need a planner, we need a recovery housing specialist. Unfortunately, John, if you flew coast guard helicopters in Katrina really well, you know, you could apply for a GS-15 recovery job inside FEMA with no recovery experiencing did it. It's not that you're not awesome. Why not helicopter and the coast guard. But I say that because the coast guard would never let me come out of FEMA and just fly a helicopter.
So the bottom line is, and I couldn't even go be, I couldn't even drive a firetruck right now. If I got a job with the city of Hickory, North Carolina fire department today, okay, I've got to go through the steps and qualifications to get where I am. So the whole goal eventually, and we started going down this path was, and this incorporates the FEMA integration teams again, is how do we go to an academy style hiring process where we hire people in groups of 30 and 40, you send them to Emmetsburg and they learn all things Stafford Act that you actually have to read the laws and the policies that govern what it is you do. Okay. I would argue that the majority of emergency managers had never read the Stafford Act. Then you sit back and, you know, you've got to learn the classroom. And then we send you to the CDP for functional exercises and training and role-playing and different things. And then we send you out into a FEMA integration team at the state level. And you're going to go out there for two to three years and learn how states receive FEMA assistance or guidance is the guidance working, you know, how do we receive that? And then how the state is going to be requesting. And you learn that you actually go out and sit down with local emergency managers. And then from there, you can apply to one of the three FEMA regions you want to live in and try to run a regional program.
Then from there you can go to headquarters and you can run national programs, and you've got to stop making the FEMA administrator a presidential appointed position. It sets the agency up for failure, just because of politics and political games that are unnecessary and going on all the time in DC. If FEMA screws up a response, the other party's bashing on FEMA, if FEMA screws up a reform response on this end and the other party is in charge. Then FEMA screwing up, you got to stop. FEMA needs to be a neutral agency that has the ability to support state and local governments without going through some arbitrary disaster declaration process to figure out how much uninsured public property you've lost. We've got to get it to a point where if you need a bucket truck, why would I hold a bucket truck back from you? Because you didn't have enough uninsured losses. It's stupid. The whole disaster declaration process was a great idea in 1979 time to rethink it. I also think that you got to get the word emergency out of FEMA job. You know, maybe it's the national disaster relief and resiliency agency or something like that. I don't know. But how do you do that? And then you start, you know, you hire people like in the academy class that John, imagine if you could hire, like, one of the biggest problems that we had is we didn't have enough bilingual staff when Harvey, Irma, and Maria hit Spanish speaking populations in California, Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. Holy cow, what if we could hire bilingual, you know, 30, 40, 50, 60, 90 bilingual individuals out of college with whatever degree and then train them on emergency management and send them out.
Guest: Brock Long (1h 4m 19s):
So, Yeah, I mean, it's, our whole industry is ripe for innovation and change is you just got to get the politicians and in DC who have forgotten that their job is compromise, you got to get them to sit down and put their politics aside and start focusing on the American citizen and saying, how do we protect them from disasters and, and not just try to do it in a bubble like they often do after big events, like 9/11 or Katrina. They've got to invite the expertise in, to reorganize for the future and, you know, the experience and not just people like me, but it's people like you, John it's people that were out there, you know, wiping the dust off disaster victims, you know? And that's it.
Host: John Scardena (1h 5m 11s):
Yeah. That's, I mean, that's a great answer. Obviously. You've thought a lot about this and it's a, we definitely need to towards that. And so the, the original question about CEM, I think you're right. We need accreditation. I just wish CEM was more trustworthy in my opinion. I wish I could see a CEM and trust. It's the number one reason why I didn't, I haven't done it despite having 10 plus years because I can, I can work without it. But Todd crap, that's the third reference to Tod.
Guest: Brock Long (1h 5m 41s):
And, you know, it's probably, you know, it's money. Nothing scares me more than walking into a local emergency managers office and the whole wall is full of every FEMA independent training course they've ever taken. Oh man.
Host: John Scardena (1h 5m 57s):
I know exactly what you're talking about. I went and met with this guy, every, literally every single online course, he had taken every single thing. Like I said, I've been in this for a while. I have two degrees in emergency management. I've been out, I've been in with multiple federal agencies. I've been at the local level, but well, that's the whole deal. This guy was talking. I understood about a third of the acronyms he was using. And I was like, well, no wonder you don't get anything done. Like it was just, it was just hilarious to me. So, okay. I got to do a big shout out there for this question with Kevin Coleman. He was on the show before and he asks a question, he's a big fan of AmeriCorps. Okay. He was AmeriCorps. That's how he started off in the field. You're talking about working up in the field. That's as definitely what he's done. And he's a at headquarters now really, really great experience. Obviously I have a high respect for him, but this is what he asks. He said so much to unpack with this episode as an alumni advocate and current program manager for FEMA Corps. I'm curious if Brock has any thoughts and what the future of the program could look like and how young professionals be involved, engaged with EM, from the AmeriCorps perspective. So before you answer your question, I want to ask you one thing, in your opinion, do you see AmeriCorps as interns?
Guest: Brock Long (1h 7m 19s):
As interns? So from me, and I see it as a, the baseline entry level position into themed potentially into FEMA, but here's the problem. It's not that easy. You can go to AmeriCorps for two years and still not qualify for any job that comes open in FEMA, because you don't meet the qualifications. You don't have the years of experience. You don't have veterans preference. You don't have all of these things. And the problem with AmeriCorps and what we saw in FEMA is that again, they don't have a real shot at going to the next level and unless some FEMA staffer redesigned the entire position description to meet their background, to hire them. That's the problem. And, you know, and, and that's the problem, you know, it's you know, and, and even with the local hiring process was a question on local hiring process. I like the local hire process too. It puts disaster victims possibly in a job if they lost their job because of the hurricane or tornado, then maybe they can be a local hire and push forward. But what was interesting is there's disparities and denial of entry because of the way the federal hire and hiring process works. And if you're from the US VI, maybe you haven't had a lot of experience of writing a resume. Well, if you want to be considered at FEMA, the first, the first thing you gotta write, you gotta win.
As the writing contest that the software absorbs your resume and read through it, picks out keywords, and then you qualify and you go get an interview or whatever else. So even if, even if somebody goes through two years of the AmeriCorps and they're the cream of the crop or the group, you can't get to them because we we've made it too, too crazy to get hired.
Host: John Scardena (1h 9m 13s):
We're known to direct hire at the same point. There should be some kind of step process to be able to become more qualified, whether it's accreditation or academy or whatever, a long-term process, when we took away direct hires, I thought that was, it was, it was a poor choice. I got, I got hired because of a direct hire. I was out there with Georgetown, with my program, and I said the right thing, and I was working in DC, happy with that job, but tap, tap, tap right on my shoulder. Hey, you said the right thing, I want to see you in my office right now and I literally walked into the office at FEMA IMAT at west and they said, tell me more about what, what that thought process was. And we talked for 30 minutes and said, we want to hire you. And that was like the, the luckiest moment of my life, because I loved my experience at FEMA. In fact, that soon to be administrator Criswell is a former Imad. I was like, yes, but it, it just goes to show that like, you're totally right. I'm glad to hear a FEMA administrator say that. I'm glad that you said something actually Napa. I was like, oh my gosh, it's so true. You said you have to leave FEMA to get a promotion in FEMA.
Guest: Brock Long (1h 10m 32s):
I did. You know, and that's funny. I love being a FEMA man, I got to see FEMA at the best when I went in on the morning of 9/11 and interviewed, and then eventually got the job, man, you know. FEMA was one of the highest places to work at the time in the federal government. And I went in as a GS 11, 12, I worked my way up. My boss retired and I was able to specialize and go into his spot because we were designing evacuation plans. And I was rare. I went from an 11 to 13, 14 and five years then after Katrina, after Katrina, man, we just got beat up. Literally, escape goat issues came on, FEMA, we gotta have somebody, we got to have a bud kick. We've gotta have somebody to blame. And you know, then FEMA was absorbed on Homeland security and all this other stuff that was going on and it was not a healthy place to work. I just, I decided to leave and it, and in retrospect, it broke my heart, leaving the agency because I love it. But I also knew it was not the environment I wanted to work in for the next five years either. So I stepped out into the private sector. When I did that, John, you wouldn't believe the number of phone calls I got, man. If I had known you were going to leave FEMA, I would have called you to see if you want to come work for us. So funny enough, I joke that, you know, if I had stayed in the regional office as a 13, I probably would've breached 15, you know, 20 years later, a GS 15, you know, management later, 20 years later, somebody would have to die or retired and I couldn't see the ladder. I took that with me. We tried to solve it, but it's hard to solve, but I literally left. It's easier for you to apply for a senior executive service job from outside the agency than it is within the agency. Because, you know, I can take a consultant, give me five years with you, John, as a consultant. And I can put you on 20 different projects that you manage and then you build the leadership skills you need to apply for the senior executive service jobs. So forget the GS 15. You just go in into the SES and that's the problem with the entire hiring process. There is no advancement like the FBI or the secret service or whatever. We hire and plug people in at various levels from the outside of the agency. And then we lose a lot of people, John, as a result of that, we lose a lot of people. They can't get up there. I jumped out and I had jumped out.
Host: John Scardena (1h 12m 55s):
On honest, you weren't the reason why I left, but my wife got pregnant and we said, we didn't want to travel. I didn't want to travel. I want to be a dad. I want to be home. So that was the reason why I jumped out. But at the same time, I understood that it was the best career move for me to get out because I actually pigeonholed myself by again, planning, operations, and then doing GIS, all people could see was this GIS or this guy who makes maps. First of all, that's not what GIS does. We can talk about that forever. But at the same time, I was like, anytime I applied for a position at back in ops which is where I really wanted to do it. AI had had the most experience in they're like, but you do GIS, but you do GIS. And so I was like, all right, I'm going to jump out here for a while. So I'm really glad that you just told me that Haggerty is going to hire me for the next five years. Man, I'm going to manage 20 projects, but.
Guest: Brock Long (1h 13m 46s):
The new emergency manager coming out of college, you're not going to get a job with FEMA unless you are, you know, a reservist, unless you can get into the reserve cat, you know, the assistance cadre that goes out there. That's probably the best way in, but you're not going to apply it from a master's degree without any experience and get a GS 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 position inside, you know, it's that FEMA. So my advice is go look at the consulting firms that can't find enough good people right now to get work done on behalf of FEMA and the state and local governments. Not only that, but look at the industry, the private sector industry that's growing in emergency management. I mean, we do work for all kinds of restaurants and, you know, mall corporations, airports are hiring emergency managers. I mean, it's just, there's a lot needs to feel. It's a great time to be in the field because there's so much money and issues that are occurring now is the time to be in, but don't just focus on getting into FEMA.
Host: John Scardena (1h 14m 46s):
I think that's an excellent point that I think that's a good point to end on. To be honest, there are so many different areas outside of FEMA. FEMA has a lot of opportunities and so I'd take that, but I am really, really grateful that I had spent time with the red cross. I spent time with the national cancer Institute, which is under NIH, which is under HHS. So I know I do know a little bit about that. So I thought your point was hilarious there, but you know, I'm grateful that I was with reaching efforts. Now that I'm working as a, a consultant myself, I work as like a, basically a subcontractor where I go in there and I get to work on all these different projects outside of FEMA. So I have all this opportunity now to, to keep learning. And so there's all these different avenues. So whether you're working at a campus level or you're working for a hospital emergency manager, what name you just get out there and keep learning. That's always the message of this podcast. So thank you for again, Brock for coming on the show for spending so much time with us really, it's been a really great experience.
Guest: Brock Long (1h 15m 44s):
Thanks, John.
Host: John Scardena (1h 15m 46s):
All right. So everybody, of course, as always, if you liked this episode, we want that five-star review. So give us that five star review. You can also follow us on Instagram at Disaster Tough Podcast. We're reposting a little bit more about Brock and some of the answers he had, basically we'll be pulling that in from LinkedIn, from other sources there, Brock is a phenomenal emergency manager. Obviously you heard that today. It's all about the dollars. It's all about getting the job done. It's about mitigation. Find ways as an emergency manager to get the job done. That's how you become disaster tough. That's how you can help other people make sure to follow us on Instagram at Disaster Tough Podcast as stay tough. Thanks.