#69 Collaboration in the Disaster Zone - Interview with host Eric Holdeman

Eric Holdeman is the host of the Disaster Zone podcast and a former EM practitioner. He shares his insights on collaboration in EM.

Disaster Zone is hosted by Eric Holdeman, an emergency manager with over 30 years of experience at the federal, state and local levels of government. Disaster Zone is a podcast that focuses on all facets of disasters; the before, during and after of events that are increasingly impacting communities around the world.

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Host: John Scardena (0s):

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Host: John Scardena (1m 47s):

Welcome back to the show everybody, it’s your host John Scardena, another great week we have coming up here. I'm so excited for this episode. We have Eric Holdeman on here. You should probably recognize his name and his face because if you look at anything related to emergency management, especially Emergency Management Magazine over the last several years, Eric is one of the lead, if not the lead, as far as I know, editor over there. So, he's been putting out column after column after column, he has about 500,000 people read his columns every year. He asked who also owns and operates Disaster Zone, which you can see on the screen behind him, another podcast, that's really great information. So, I'm excited to have Eric on here and to hear his thoughts on emergency management. Eric, welcome to the show.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (2m 25s):

Well, thanks Joh, have we been wanting to do this previously and I'm going to be happy to reciprocate and have you on the Disaster Zone podcast and to my editor at Emergency Management Magazine, I have to say I'm blogging on their site. So those are not columns or blogs, but I then also do write some actual articles for them, do some interviews, that type of thing.

Host: John Scardena (2m 51s):

You have a lot of articles on there. You've been doing it for quite a while. In fact, if you go look at the repository of the articles you've written or the blogs you were in, I mean, it's quite extensive. So, you've had this great opportunity where you get to dive in deep into emergency management for a long time, right? Oh my gosh. Because of that, you also get to see how emergency management has been slowly changing and creeping into other areas. And with that, I got to see a quick preview of an article that you wrote for IEM specifically addressing that. We'd like to talk about the phases of emergency management today and your perceptions or your experience related to collaboration and working with different stakeholders today. Let's just dive in, in terms of your let's say last 14 years of writing posts and looking at this comprehensively, what are some takeaways for you in emergency management? Where is emergency management heading based off of the history?

Guest: Eric Holdeman (3m 57s):

Well, you used the word creeping. I think that's a good word. We're creeping, there's a lot of progress being made, but I say that our profession is still in its tweens. I mean, as it was only 1979, when FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) was created. You know, emergency management came out of the civil defense era and it's only been about the last five or six years that we've had some states like Hawaii and Idaho changed their name from states civil defense over to emergency management. So, it's evolving, but a lot of times we do kind of get whipsawed by what the current hot topic is nationally. We certainly, we gyrate towards whatever the last big disaster was, whether it's 9/11, Katrina, Sandy.

Host: John Scardena (4m 53s):

Yeah, I like to call those sifting events, there's so much in the pile of what emergency management is, and somehow we're both expanding and figuring it out, like what we are really are at the same time. So for all those different ingredients in the sifter right now, each major event, that shaking that happens, we get to see like the new aspect of what the expectation is for our field, from the outside perspective for example, when Congress made the national teams. But we also get to figure out like what our true capabilities are. I just had Kevin Coleman on the show and Kevin was talking about how the pandemic was, they literally invented the playbook. They invented the titles, they vetted all these different things to make that happen. That happens so much in our field, right? Like one day we have to stop inventing new things and just like develop it more, right.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (5m 46s):

I think people ignore the planning that's been done. I know I was still at King county, Washington state rails, the emergency management director there for 11 years, but in 2007, we were working on and then we flew planning and there's a whole playbook, all established for that. When I say there's a couple curve balls that we never planned for in the past on a pandemic, one of them was testing. Testing was not a big thing that we had in the plan and the whole issue of personal protective equipment and supply and the shortage. Everybody thought, well, we got financial store stockpile and that solves it. Well, we found out that’s a poor assumption, so I know a lot has been done. Sometimes people don't read the plan, even as you're getting ready for the actual hazard, even if you have time to anticipate them.

Host: John Scardena (6m 42s):

What’s shocking to me is, how do I say this? As much as I get it, I don't understand why, because it's a pandemic, it is slow onset and so forth. It's hard for people to see, but the fact that there's been so much false information and rhetoric around that, we're actually in a pandemic, even having to convince people that there's an actual pandemic right now has been a mountain of a task for so many emergency managers. It's almost unbelievable. Aye Aye Aye. One of my after actions for this pandemic was, or is, I mean, we're still discovering it, is that the educational system has officially failed because we have the most educated population in history. More people have college degrees, more people have had access to education in the history of the world and yet you still have to explain to people the purpose of wearing a mask or like you can't see the pandemic or that there's not microchips in the vials. So, it's like, man people are dumb dude.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (7m 44s):

We can spend a lot of time on this. I mean, 10 years ago we were worried about rumor control. That was the concept and I’m a big advocate towards use social media to mindful, you know, what's being said. It used to be, you have to watch television with the radio to see what the media is saying. Then you provide accurate facts to counter misinformation that just happens in a rapidly developing event. But in the last four or five years, it's moved from rumor control to disinformation. That's the big thing here where people on purpose know what they're doing. They're sewing seeds of distrust and just not misinformation, disinformation. They're doing it to make money, to get clicks for the website. It's a big difference. Now, the multimedia, there's people like us out there who could be trying to make money just by coming up with conspiracy theories and selling it and there's always somebody seeming to buy it.

Host: John Scardena (8m 50s):

I rarely if ever even, comment to anybody's posts because I understand how the algorithm works. If I like, or I comment on it, then more people see it. So, I usually leave those stuff alone. But I actually had a friend at the beginning of the pandemic, she shared that the virus lived in people's mouths and the virus can only sustain a certain temperature. So, if you drink a boiling water, you will not get the virus. She shared some bogus report and I'm like, man, the fact that there was some idiot out there who shared that. Then my friend who has a college degree, again, stupidity college degree and shares, you should drink boiling water. You know, it's just like, holy crap. So, I had to like contact her and say like, Hey, you have to take that off right now. You're going to get somebody hurt, if not yourself.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (9m 45s):

Yeah. I drank the hydroxy chloroquine. Yeah. Hey, number one, number one treatment, therefore…

Host: John Scardena (9m 52s):

Oh man, hey bleach, we can go into this forever. So, let's not get into that too much, but you're right misinformation, disinformation is real. I remember taking a PIO (public information officer) course, I don't know, 10 years ago or so and we called it room and control at the time. People just misunderstanding or getting excited about information and now it's definitely a whole new ball game. Luckily there's people out you who are writing factual blog posts all about this so that's good. But another one from the vaccination or from the pandemic, you said in 2007, you worked on a playbook for flu pandemic. For flu pandemics in 2014, I was part of a task force that wrote a national playbook national plan for a pandemic response. By the end of February of 2020, all my friends in DC were like, hey by the way, we're not following that plan. They are reinventing the real wheel and it's like, oh man, I wonder how many people have worked on this. I will say, you know, I'll be at all of that. We didn't consider mass vaccination sites, we didn't consider mass testing. The projects, my friends like Kevin Coleman and Joe Dellamura at FEMA that they had to work with and the conditions that they're working under is pretty much phenomenal what they were able to accomplish.

But that kind of opens up that thought process of okay, all these different people you were working on one aspect, I was working on another aspect. They have new constraints that they're considering now. It feels siloed from a person who has been so involved in the process from an emergency management practitioner to writing about this. Tell us about the coordination piece that needs to happen. Not in just a pandemic, but kind of every disaster.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (11m 49s):

Well, I am really and when I talked about coordination, I'm thinking about regional coordination to that. The silo piece is, are how we organize politically, whether you're a city or a county and I always say, you can tell how a emergency management organization thinks about themselves and thinks about regional by looking at their maps. You're a GIS guy, almost every map I see hosted on a wall somewhere has the jurisdiction as an island, there is nothing beyond the actual jurisdictional boundaries of where they are, but that's just the worst thing and in my mind, we have things regionally and for me, that you define a region by one that shares a common population. People move a common transportation system and a common business space here for Washington state. I'm in Western Washington, over half the state's population is in three or four counties and that's the heartbeat, that's the economic engine and that's the region. That's one of the reasons the transportation system, when they do projects now, they're thinking more regionally, but we've got to do that. Not just for transportation, we have to do it for emergency management, for planning, to kind of get out of the box. That means expanding, who are the partners who we are actually working with. And yes, it includes the private sector, for us to be just looking at it from a government solution standpoint, you know, we're headed down the wrong path. We need to engage with everybody and I go into a lot of reasons why people will do that. Sometimes it has to do with personalities of who's next door or who you can't seem to get along with, that type of thing.

Host: John Scardena (13m 40s):

Yeah. Our field is so small, it is majorly defined by the relationship, but emergency managers should be really good at relationships because I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times, emergency manager is a misnomer. It's really our emergency coordinator. The best emergency manager is the best coordinator in the room. So, if you can't get along with people, then you kind of suck at your job, right?

Guest: Eric Holdeman (14m 6s):

I'd say we're facilitators. The other piece of it is we lead without authority. So, we're expected to lead, but we have no direct authority. We can't compel people, especially on a regional basis. You can't go to the mayor or the executive and say, I need a memo telling the department, no, we're talking about the folks in the other county over, we're talking about the private sector. So, when you lead, you're leading without authority, I think that's a major piece and the misnomer, I think a lot of people think, well the emergency manager, that's the command center. Now there's no commanding. There's a lot of coordination and information sharing, that goes on at the emergency operations center. I prefer the term emergency coordination center, because it's descriptive of what happens in that facility.

Host: John Scardena (14m 57s):

I think we're going to be talking a little bit more about this on your show about like the meaning of things. But I actually think whoever came up with the term emergency management was a genius because it makes everybody else think that that person is actually in charge of them, but they're actually not. Oh, he's the emergency manager like, oh, listen to that guy. But actually, at the end of the day, oh by the way, I don't have any authority to tell you what to do, I just kind of hope you do it.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (15m 25s):

Oh, okay. My favorite movie, I haven't bought it, I should, it's about Kaino. This is with Tommy Lee Jones (LA) and then there's this lava flow coming down three, and there's all these firefighters. They're white hap cheap. Right. Tom really gets them together. Okay. Movies, Jersey bears around. Then we have a fleet of helicopters dropping water on it, spraying water and it's it. Isn't the humor of trying to stop a lava flow with water. The humor is fire chief listening to the emergency managers, direct them what to do, give me a break. We actually saw the movie in the theater and I was laughing out loud and my wife says, stop it people are looking,

Host: John Scardena (16m 15s):

I'm going to make a ridiculous plug here because that is hilarious. I have a podcast with Todd Devo and Patrick McGuinn called Movie AAR, our movie after action review, where we look at disasters that happened in movies and we kind of make fun of it. Like what happens if you know, they had the marshmallow man in New York. If he blows up, what happens is like people clean that up. Is he, is that a public health issue? Like how do you do? So.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (16m 45s):

And the Graham crackers and chocolate Hershey's.

Host: John Scardena (16m 48s):

Exactly citywide smore night. Yeah. But we've looked at volcano, we've looked at a couple different movies. One of which is another hilarious one is San Andreas.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (17m 2s):

Yeah. Is that the one where they lower the FEMA director into the hole, set off the atomic bomb? That was a great idea, especially if this was Joe Elba.

Host: John Scardena (17m 18s):

Oh my gosh. Wait, hold on. I have something, wait for it. There we go. Here we go. One more time. There you go. That's hilarious.

No, this one is a with a rock and he's a first responder and he's going to the dam on a helicopter and he hears his family's in trouble. So, he straight up steals the helicopter, hijacks three cars, he breaks like 18 federal and state laws and completely abandoned his post. Yet, it's like all at the end cause he has his wife and kid and I'm like, oh, that's not good advice.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (17m 57s):

The Rock was the number one guy in people, it wasn't the sexiest man, it was what makes America great I think, or something like that. Rock was number one. He’s got some competition.

Host: John Scardena (18m 10s):

Well, you know what? Bring it on because I can take that guy I'm pretty sure, that's hilarious. So, going back to the conversation of the coordination piece and the next phases in terms of, I mean you've already called it out, right, it should be emergency coordination center. We're starting to look at the epidemiology of emergency management and emergency management has, depending on who you talk to, either four phases or five phases, some people call it the preparedness cycle. Or, if you’re in FEMA, which is kind of stupid by the way, because you don't prepare to respond, you actually respond. Other people say it's for, you know, planning, mitigation, response recovery. You recently wrote about this. Tell us more about your thoughts on that.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (19m 5s):

Well, I lived through the whole thing of the first change that happened, and this is how the pendulum swings is after  9/11, FEMA got inserted into department of Homeland security and we took as a profession, a hard right turn because 9/11 towards terrorism only. The initial push was to replace the word mitigation with prevention and there was a lot of pushback from emergency managers just across the board to do that. Finally, the acquiesced and prevention and mitigation was allowed to co-exist if you will.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (19m 49s):

But then they brought in this word protection, which I don't know when that came in, but substituting preparedness with the word protection. I don't see the connection there at all, and my big thing is I asked emergency managers all the time, what are the phases of emergency management? They give me, you know, planning and mitigation, planning or preparedness, response, and recovery. I asked FEMA people what are the phases and they gave me the four phases. Yep. The doctrine that's written today has five, prevention, and protection, but nobody knows it. I think in this case, ignoring it is a great idea.

Host: John Scardena (20m 34s):

Well, you know why it's in there, the true reason, right? I mean, when we folded under DHS, DHS basically said, well, you're in our agency now and so if you're a sub, then this is one of the things you do. The problem with that is, and speaking of culturally, depending on who you talk to, some agencies are actually starting to require emergency managers to carry a weapon, that's happening in Philadelphia. So, we even talked about it at a federal agency I had in DC. I actually know another emergency manager who was on this show, who is the emergency management coordinator or director for another federal agency and they hired him because of his special forces background and they wanted him to implement the security aspect to emergency management. Again, going back to an earlier point, our field is driven by both internal and by political, and the people who hear about emergency managers expect us to be also responders. They set the precedence of, we want somebody with security background, then that's what they're going to focus on because that's where the money's going. So, you have all these conflicting ideas and methodologies. Our field is still so much, you say twins, I say infancy. I think by 2030, we will kind of have a really good foundation of what should be. Then 2040 universities by then, we'll catch up to like having a standardization of what.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (22m 14s):

That's another long conversation. You know the thing that reminds me of, I took over exercise planning in State of Washington, I'd started there probably in 91, but became a supervisor and then unit manager. But it was the first director of the meeting where local directors came and we had the local emergency manager, didn't like stayed at all. This particular person, well, what is the status of our exercise and training program in the states, which had happened none actually none, zero. I said, well, there's a crawl, walk run. Right now we're kind of sitting up, sitting up straight and drooling on ourselves. That's our current status. So when you're talking about infancy, starting from the bottom, there wasn't a public education program either in 1991, Washington state.

Host: John Scardena (23m 19s):

Every federal agency in the United States is required to have a designated emergency coordinator by law. Most federal agencies, that designated emergency coordinator is not the emergency manager. In fact, some do actually have emergency managers. It's usually the head of maintenance, that person knows the facility so well that they should be able to talk to first responders. I'm like, hey, by the way, maybe the emergency managers should know the facility so well and speak the language of the first responders so that if there was an incident, they do direct coordination. But even then, there's so much methodology and personal opinion that we need to flush that out. I think it's time for our field to start saying, hey, this is what we do, this is what we don't do. It's so hard to do that, especially because we deal with politics so much, but it’s kind of the name of the game. When we can't define it as a field, then it just opens it up much more to, well then I'm going to define it for you.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (24m 22s):

Yeah and I always say that if these well-meaning people came in or come in to a new administration, political appointees, which are okay, that's how the system works, but they all want to say, well, what can I do that's new and different and what can I change? Because they don't want to do, what's been done before. I think that leads to a lot of the change we see as I've listened to a podcast about UFO, I listen to New York times the daily and the guy would saying, well, they're not called UFO more than UAPs unidentified aerial phenomenon. You think that's going to catch on with the public. I think it's going to be UFO. If you start talking about UAP, nobody's going to know what you're talking about. It's nice that you came up with the term, but ditch it, folks use terminology people can understand. Yeah.

Host: John Scardena (25m 17s):

We had that problem with technology and depending on the generation and their level of technology use every company out there wants to put like their own, like we're so freaking play button, it used to be a triangle facing, you know, facing right. Now you got to figure out, is it a circle, triangle, hexagon is a four dimensional creature, you know? Like you just try to figure out what things are now.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (25m 43s):

See. That's the same process that you described. We're going to make a difference because I'm being paid to make a difference. So, I have to come up with something new.

Host: John Scardena (25m 52s):

Yeah, in fact, one of the two Patrick McGinn’s credit has been on this show, he's the director of salvation army for Northern California, Nevada. He's definitely a thought leader in the space and he's like, hey, as much as humanly possible, the emergency managers benefit from using other emergency managers templates, like don't think you have to reinvent the wheel. Start creating standardization so we can all just increase.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (26m 20s):

Monkey see, monkey do is fine as well. That has lots of thing about our profession, by the way that I really like that emergency managers in general, you can never say always right, but in general, are willing to share everything they got. If I walked into a city or county and other states said, hey, I'm doing research on, I'm trying to figure out how to do it. Can you show me what you do? Can I get a copy of that document? We give our information away. We don't hoard it, there's no foil of what we're doing. That's a great cultural aspect of emergency management. I think I can tell you a quick story on that is we have in the Squali earthquake happened and we rapidly put out an after action report on that. I heard from another county saying, hey, we love that, could you send us a digital copy of it? So, we could use that format and we did, hey, we're happy to share. Anyway, when we got it back, they did a jurisdictional name change, but everything else the same exactly our time. But the thing was, this was exactly what we did. So, we don't copy something perfectly.

Host: John Scardena (27m 37s):

Yeah. Templating is okay, yeah. Well, it's funny, I'm okay for templates. I'm not okay for cookie cutter. This is the problem, so I run a private emergency management group called Doberman and we  are hardcore against cookie cutter because I've gotten so many plans where it's like a brick, like half of it's just definitions. Going back to that Philadelphia, I reviewed a FEMA region three, I'm super calling out FEMA region three right now, I reviewed a FEMA region three strategic plan for disasters. They hired a contractor. This is when I worked for FEMA and it was 2000 pages and I opened it up and half of it was definitions. I'm starting to go through the definitions and I'm like, okay, they have a definition for a volcano in here, like in Philadelphia first of all, we don't have volcanoes in Philadelphia. Second of all, the fact that you're even bringing that up and having to define this really basic stuff, I'm sure that got seven figures this company, but it was worthless. So our company is like, okay GIS, we're going to pump in data. We're going to be pumping all this stuff, creating a template that's really clean, but all of it should be unique to the region. I like how you said that region earlier, by the way, what are your metrics on working populations? Really fascinating to think about one of the map products I would always have to make or choose to make as a daytime versus nighttime population, because it allows you to see how many people work in that area and also allowed us to see the scope of how far they would come. A family would come if a family member was impacted, you know, at a school or something. So really fascinating you brought that up.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (29m 22s):

I'll give you the example of that actually there's a project going on you know, we could talk for days I think John, but there's a project going on down here called pod, maybe the points of distribution. This would be an orchestrator for an eight county region, regional accounts, traffic preparedness grant, and the homeless county, which is north of King County leading this effort. They hired a contractor, includes a lot of mapping, but one of the key dynamics they looked at is a daytime/nighttime population, because you're going to be praying an earthquake kind of trapped wherever you are when that happens. So, we're looking at food availability stores, that type of thing, based on the different population metrics. So that's the exact type of use of the information we just talked about.

Host: John Scardena (30m 13s):

That's awesome. It shows that coordination and learning how other people use it, the same data can really impact so many different areas. Well, we're running out of time here pretty soon, but I just want to call out that one Disaster Zone, another pitch for Disaster Zone, and everybody should tune into that, but really fascinating topic to think about the holistic approach of emergency management. What are the phases? What do we call it? How do we approach it? How does that coordination piece and you and I just started scratching the surface on this conversation. Maybe we'll continue it on onto your podcast for sure.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (30m 51s):

I got something I'd like to share before we go closing thoughts. Just on this whole issue of regional, as I talked about, it's invitational, you can't compel anybody. I could tell you another 20 stories, but I won't,  no. Working with a large metropolitan city here in Washington state, wherever that could be, but I'll eliminate that, but you can't compel people. So, all you can do is invite. I found one of the ways you can engage people, it's just keep giving them the information. They're not giving you anything back, but give them information to establish a relationship to the thing. Yet sometimes you can't burn through that. But I tell folks, well look, there's a lot of movement for people, quick jobs or they change jobs. They get fired, they get promoted, they die, you know, you can wait them out. You know, maybe the next person will be much more receptive to working with you. That the one. The other is it's a military maneuver called isolate and bypass, is you can't Ram yourself through someone who you have no authority so just go round them. I'd always tell my staff go where there is energy, if they're not interested then fine, you're good, we're good. We're just going to go around and work with those people want to be, and you can't be confrontational because a lot of those personality types, they love the confrontation. So, the other thing I used to tell my staff is friends come and go, enemies you keep forever. So, go along, get along, but there's that. Lastly, I've seen it work where you can use other people supporting your effort to convince them that they should be participating. So, you're not doing the work. They see the positive nature what's going on and they convince the other person they should be involved in it. So those are just some tips when you feel frustrated on trying to work regionally.

Host: John Scardena (33m 3s):

Okay. Well then, I got to ask you one more question based off of all that. So , talked a lot about where the field is going and you just talked about how to work with people. In terms of the future of the emergency manager, what would you like to see in the next 10 years in terms of our field?

Guest: Eric Holdeman (33m 25s):

Big things here? One is on a state level, I do not think I'm pleased. A lot of people hear that emergency management being aligned with the national guard is the best alignment. People make that decision and make that alignment because they think disasters are all about response. But if we're talking about disaster resilience, resilience is all about mitigation. That's not in the national guard or military culture. I came out of a 20-year industry officer career. I thought emergency management was all about planning and response from that standpoint. So, having that alignment under the chief executive officer is the best place to be.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (34m 10s):

Can you be functional and successful in other places? Yes. But when you have a culture of response, that's national, you know, we're here, we've got specialized equipment. We're here to save the day and they liked that attention. You're going to end up being trapped in the response cycle. I think that's one climate change is going to change our world. You know, more frequent, more severe, those apps. It's I gotta do this. Look, when we say it bleeds, it leads. Well, if it's flood, if it burns, it's in the news and so we're going to be much more critical to the functioning of our communities and our states overall. There's much more awareness now, the cost of disasters, and that will help drive more attention towards mitigation. I think mitigation is going to be huge. We got some money coming forward, but a billion dollars spread over the United States for the building resilient communities is not a lot, even though it sounds like a lot, but we have what we can and make lemonade out of it.

Host: John Scardena (35m 17s):

I like that. In fact, I always add my 2 cents on here, here’s my 2 cents to both two comments. I believe that mitigation is the most focused thing that we should be. We will be working on meaning spending most of our amount of our time. Yeah, that's a better way to say it. Mitigation is the thing that we should spending most of our amount of time on. However response will always be the most important function of emergency management. Because if we can't stop everything, then you have to be able to save lives when it comes down to it. Nothing's more important than trying to coordinate tools in a response.

So, if we can pair those two thoughts up, they are not conflicting, spend most of your time mitigating disasters and the ones that you can't, you got to be really, really good at response. So mitigation should be king, never forget response, and you'll probably be successful. The other end of that spectrum, here's, I'm going to say it on this show. So, if anybody else comes with this idea, I can say it, I said it on the air. Here's my super radical idea to deal with the major droughts. Okay. East coast gets way too much water. In fact, Maryland was taxing people for the amount of water that ran on their property, which is really corrupt idea, by the way. Anyways, if we can create a system where we trap all the water from a hurricane and move that water to the west coast, through giant canals, then everybody wins. That's my big grand crazy idea. So somebody appears out of that, do that.

Guest: Eric Holdeman (36m 51s):

I'm going to give you my 1 cent reaction to what you said earlier, and then we'll go down to a half a cent. Now I have to think about what I tell local emergency managers and state people, but more local, is if you don't want to get fired, you have to have a plan. You gotta be able to respond because that's the expectation that's there and the other biggie is don't screw up a warning because warnings that are screwed up are very public. So, keep your job, have a plan respond well, they'll screw up a warning.

Host: John Scardena (37m 30s):

I love that. Actually, that's probably the quote for the show. So, I will say this. Thanks again Eric for coming on the show, check out Disaster Zone, I will be on Eric’s show as well, so you can check out there. We're going to continue the conversation. If you like to show, which you should have, you can do a couple of different things. One, give us a five-star rating and subscribe to, if you have a question for Eric specifically, you can do a couple different things. Unlike most of our shows, you can actually reach out directly to the Disaster Zone and through Eric, and we'll put that in the show notes how to do that, but you can also tag Eric and the Disaster Zone in our social media feeds, whether it's a government emergency management or Disaster Tough you can also send us an email. If you don't want to, you gotta be shy. That's fine.

Send us an email at info@dobermanemg.com, we'll forward that on to Eric. He can reply to you directly, but check us out each week, we have great content. If you want an emergency manager to help you out on a project here you're working on, contact us at info@dobermanemg.com and we'll see you next week.