Strike Teams

#71 The National Strike Team & EM Operations - Interview with Ops Chief Tim Britt

The National Strike Team actively engages in catastrophic disasters. Tim Britt is the Operation Section Chief on the team and talks next steps for the program.

The Post Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (PKEMRA) created the National Strike Team - 3 sets of emergency managers staged across the US to act in times of catastrophe. FEMA took on these teams and called them the National Incident Management Assistance Team (N-IMAT). Tim Britt is the Operations Section Chief on the Red team (formally known as N-IMAT West). Host John Scardena served with Tim on this team, they catch up and talk about future steps of the N-IMAT Program.

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This Podcast has moved to the Readiness Lab.

Host: John Scardena (0s):

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Host: John Scardena (1m 42s):

Welcome back to the show everybody, it’s your host John Scardena. I am so excited for this episode. I have Tim Brett, the operations section chief for the National Incident Management Assistance Team. Red is what I think they're called now. Oh, he got the red on the shirt, wow they updated everything, that's cool. When I was there, the color was gold, so maybe they've gone down in value out of now, but Tim's the man. I'm excited to talk about what the national strike team is doing and see about future plans. I'm sure he's going to give you great advice today. Tim, welcome back to the show.

Guest: Tim Britt (2m 16s):

Hey John, thanks to be back. Appreciate the opportunity.

Host: John Scardena (2m 19s):

Yeah, absolutely. So first things first, are you following hockey at all?

Guest: Tim Britt (2m 27s):

Only the guy who got shot in the chest with a firework.

Host: John Scardena (2m 33s):

Tragic man, freaking nuts, dude. I'm like no, I'm laughing, but it's absolutely horrible. I will say though, it kind of makes sense for one reason and it's going to be really dark, but just follow me for a second. He played for the Columbus Blue Jackets, Ohio. Of course he went up to Michigan and they killed him, right. Essentially Michigan's the worst. So go Bucks, Ohio state, but seriously I have to make light of it. I mean it shows that like fireworks are dangerous, but you think the guy could like take it right with all those hockey pucks hitting him or something. I don’t know man, exploded on his chest, right?

Guest: Tim Britt (3m 13s):

Yeah. I think that just amplifies the necessity for PPE. Now, like you're doing operations, whether it's hot tub fireworks, or actually going into a contaminated environment has not area. You've got to have your PPPE on because if you don't have the right stuff, yeah you're going to be impacted.

Host: John Scardena (3m 32s):

The fact that they were shooting off mortars next to a hot tub just tells you everything about like something could go wrong. I mean, I don't mean to like make light of it, but like seriously, there's probably a lot of really obvious takeaways from that situation of time and place and it is unfortunate. So you're not following the Las Vegas Knights. I don't really follow them either, but that was a lot of fun when we went to that. Yeah, that was awesome. I still have that video somewhere of us doing that. Okay let's talk about your job. This is why people want to talk to us. First of all, red, did we talk about this last time? The rebranding of the IMAT teams? There's a lot of big changes that's happening with the IMAX, right? I mean, there was a new directive that came out and stuff.

Guest: Tim Britt (4m 20s):

Oh yeah, got that. I meant directives. We're not operating off of the car while memo that, Hey, I actually have it right here from 2011, which our response metrics were kind of measured against this guidance from 2011. The new IMAT directive has our… gosh, this is crazy. I've got this stuff right here. This is hot. I mean the little metrics tags I can go right to, It's important. I mean, I'm asked to board within two hours’ drive driving instance in the continental United States within 12 hours.

Oh, corn is 24 hours. Right? So we've got some great readiness objectives and capabilities within 18 hours of arrival, complete initial assessment of unstable critical infrastructure. So it's really good metrics lined out, you know, to see what right looks like. Or you're not getting the job done, we're not meeting those metrics that are laid out there. So important objectives put in their forest.

Host: John Scardena (5m 28s):

The two hour thing is, I mean, I operated under that as well when we were there. But to see that actually outlined as an official metric, you know, how many times did we say we were out the door in two hours and we'd get the call on four, six, and you know, get on a commercial flight. Has that changed at all? Do you guys ever, actually, so this is a funny thing about being alive, Matt. Like we'd always test using military flights, but then we'd all get on commercial. Have you guys actually implemented that at all? Or what?

Guest: Tim Britt (5m 58s):

Well, we have done the coast guard load up in, fly out, but not in a response, right. Because you know, we execute the known type incident, like in their weather related normally right. Where we have a vision on what that timeline looks like as opposed to the Wasatch earthquake scenario. Or two, we just spent this last previous three days working on the Bay Area or quick response and the Alaska earthquake catastrophic earthquake response where you may see that military flight because there's no foresight to plan backwards plan that arrival time.

Host: John Scardena (6m 45s):

Black swan event. Yeah, I have to remind myself, this is public knowledge. Okay, so I'm not giving away secret here. When I got to the IMAT team, I'd been on the IMF team for about three weeks, just joined FEMA from another federal agency. We went down to FEMA region nine and this planner, I'll just leave him nameless for now. He's like, Hey, I just finished the catastrophic plan for the Bay Area and he shows us the maps.

Again, I'm the GIS guy, so I'm supposed to know the maps, right? I'm looking at the maps and the evacuation routes, and I'm like, this is way off to the point where I gave this as public knowledge. So I'm not giving away anything crazy here. There was one evacuation route outside of the Bay Area and that one evacuation route goes by Lawrence Livermore, National Laboratories. I said, Hey, if you're in a catastrophic event where you're truly trying to evacuate the entire region, national laboratories will be impacted, you really don't want everybody to be driving by that. He was like, oh, they haven't had live testing in years. I was like, oh, just kidding. I was there three months ago and yes they do. I'm not going to tell you what the kind of stuff they have, but they have a lot of stuff that if it mixes with the air, that's not good for me, and that was the only evacuation route out of location. I was like, maybe you want to revisit. He's like, well, I just chose the best route. I was like, you did not choose the best route of go, let's pump the brakes there. So I don’t know, that was my last review of the Bay Area evacuation plan.

Guest: Tim Britt (8m 39s):

Well, feel better now because there are other routes out there that are going to be utilized. You know, this scenario is still, there's the public version of a plan out there. The operation would probably at a minimum be broken out into probably three different kind of areas of operation, four geographic branches, but supported by a designated federal, state staging areas for each of those operational kind of areas. I'm kind of mixing terms, I don't want to confuse anybody. Yeah, so the North Bay headed up North Coast, there's the 80-corridor west egress out, then there's that south bay exit. So yeah, not just one area now, and yeah, it's unfortunate that the region nine office is right there on the Hayward fault. So, it's a concept of itself.

Host: John Scardena (9m 48s):

It's the same thought process of having FEMA region two the freedom tower, you know, like the target. Right, I think there's some political weight there of like saying like, Hey, FEMA's there, it's safe and trying to help people feel like it's safer. But in terms of strategic, I remember a long time ago, they were talking about moving FEMA region nine to the Capitol, but they decided to keep it in Oakland. So, I don't know, there's a lot of planning constraints there. In fact, you guys have been dealing with a lot of different planning and constraints. We talked in December about how COVID changed a lot of things in the virtual aspect of that.

Now that I think the world has gotten tired of talking about COVID and politics, they're open even though we have the Delta variant, to me of all these other things, but we also have vaccinations now in terms of like call Congress, shelters and the response, pretty much all of FEMA, Joseph this on the show, pretty much all FEMA has been vaccinated at this point. So, in terms of like future responses, do you feel like it's getting kind of back to like the normal, or do you feel like COVID taught to you so many lessons that like everyone's rewriting the book? Like what are your thought processes there?

Guest: Tim Britt (11m 3s):

Well, I think we're talking operations. I mean, Kobe was definitely a limiting factor. You know, there are constraints that specifically, in the mass care arena and resource availability, for any sort of medical decompression, you know. So, that was always a consideration on how we responded, you know, the team itself, we spent six weeks in Louisiana during kind of a heightened COVID right. Kind of amplified felt firsthand that mascara mission and the medical availability of resources, you know, to decompress or even to medical transport. Right. So, yeah, that was impactful. I think coming out, you know, we're kind of metaphorically coming out the other side of this thing now and headed right back into another hurricane, fire season, and the national IMS, you know, really are, from my perspective in kind of what our role is in that catastrophic big type one plus event. That's the mission set that we can't fail on. Right. That's as a national IMAT, we go there and not know what we're supposed to do would be an embarrassment to myself.

Like what have you been doing the last year of not preparing for this, right. We've got some pretty good, you know, a basic approach to complex problems, right. That I think can be applied across operations that we've come up with. So, looking forward to executing them either in an exercise environment, preferably as opposed to a real incident that can hit this catastrophic, that Alaska or California, or for the whole Cascadia subduction zone, you know?

Host: John Scardena (13m 7s):

Okay. So, in terms of understanding those, you just explained like, Hey, we're doing these new things where we want to implement them, we want to test them out. Recognizing like county level emergency manager or campus level of emergency manager, you know, they have different operational constraints, they have different operational perspectives. Is there some advice that you could give them from like your lessons learned as the ops chief to say like, Hey, this is what you should apply at your level, at any level.

Guest: Tim Britt (13m 38s):

Right. Yeah. That's the thing that we tried to do is operationally try to create a brilliant at the basics. Right, and I think this could apply to the county. You know, I was in Calloway, we asked the state of California, so I get that state relationship and the state relationship we're supporting the county. Right. I had conversations and we went back and forth on this with our emergency services, mass care, critical infrastructure, our branch directors, right. We said, Hey, what makes us good? Right. Briefing out an FCO reporting on information and establishing operations.

We really came up with, you can apply this at the catastrophic level and to a flood in your county. That's the nuances of established communications, right? Talk to everybody, find out who you can and cannot talk to, gain access to that impact, that area, assess the impact and then deliver the capability, right. You can do that as a county emergency manager or as the federal government coming into a state, right.

So that initial approach to establishing your operations, and then how do we communicate and relay to inform decision-making from the USCG or the director of emergency management for your county, or, or what you have and operate off of, where's the line of efforts in that incident or the current operations that are ongoing. Identify which ones those are identify, which are the critical considerations to those and what are the limiting factors, right? Then what are your resources that you have, what's coming in and what do you need? Then finally, what are the future operations? What am I going to have to support? Where am I going to have to sustain forward? I think if we did it in Delta and we did it wore out, we kind of knocked it down to that and it was really effective. You didn't get a, Hey, here's what I did today briefs right. I know you did your job, right, that's why we're here. You know, I trust that right. Then apply those kinds of four areas in a quad chart is kind of what we visually look at too. So, I think those two concepts are going to play well for us.

Host: John Scardena (16m 26s):

I love the, tell me what you did today, or let me tell you what I did today, man. There's so many of those meetings where I was like, I do not need to hear this at all. Like, can we move on? It always has felt like somebody patting themselves on the back, like, Hey, this is what I did. Then you create a culture of thinking you all did really great because you never took time to talk about the gaps, right. So, hey what do we need to get done? So of course, Tim Brit, our friendly Marine is going to say like, Hey, let's think about what comes first. I was actually just telling who was Kevin Coleman, I was just talking to him, or was it Kevin Koehlmoos, Patrick McGuinn. It was somebody, one of our mutual friends. We've had a really great year with Doberman. We've hired a lot of really talented people and what happens is people want to create their own projects. They want to like expand, they want to do career development, all that kind of stuff. They start making these goals, and the question I keep on going back to them with, and it's coming kind of repetitive. It's coming with kind of a thing is, what is the outcome you want? If they can't tell me the outcome they want, that means they're approaching the planning process from the wrong direction. You always start with the outcome in mind for IMAT.

It's how do you go home right? How do you get people out of shelters? How do you return to normal? How do you get into recovery? That's the outcome. So, it's just really fascinating that the advice you give is so applicable to anybody. It's like get away from the fluff. As I'm talking too much myself, you brought up three things. Yeah. You brought up three things that I wrote down here. Basically, you're describing situational awareness and true situational awareness. Get in, get into the disaster, assess the damages, make courses of action, go, right. I'm a big fan of situational awareness. I don't think it's utilized as much as it should be in emergency management. Therefore, a lot of decisions create snowballs that have directions, aimless directions. So, I think that's a really good call out. In fact, maybe you can bring that up a little bit later. Again, you talk about lines of effort. This is where maybe for a while, pause here, I actually have a third one, the support versus sustain lines of effort. Tell me more about lines of effort.

Guest: Tim Britt (18m 57s):

Boy, you're going to embarrass me with a book definition, right? Conceptionally, those are the current operations, right, that are impacting community lifelines. Those key factors, let's say mass care would be a line of effort. And along that line of effort, you have an outcome or an end state, but you know, along that line of effort, there are intermediate objectives that need to take place to stabilize that community lifeline or that operation temporary powers. Another one, right? That would be a line of effort bringing stabilizing the power requirements for community lifeline.

What does that end define, that end state, and then apply what needs to happen along the intermediate objectives, along that line of effort. It can be a little bit wonky because you'll look at it visually linear when the actions may not be linear. Okay, something to keep in mind when you're talking about it and briefing it. We do a federal incident approach that we developed. It outlines the line of efforts, shows the resources, shows the gaps, what are we doing to mitigate against maybe environmental factors to execute that line of effort really helps me see it operationally like wherever and in a C is really complex.

It's really has a bunch of interdependencies. Then maybe that's where you're going to stand up a task force within your organization, bring all the key players together. That's really one of the benefits of developing that line of effort, writing it down because of the efforts that it takes, the communication effort in cross coordination effort to build it, to be able to articulate it, usually get you to the outcome of that situational awareness you can talk about.

Host: John Scardena (21m 6s):

The interdependency was the word that was coming up in my mind. It's an easy way to explain something that's interdependent and even interconnected the way I would describe it as like the fourth grader doing the solar system. If you do like a solar system display, you have the sun, and then you have these perfect equal rings of where each of the planets are. That's a really easy way to explain what the solar system looks like. By the way, there are nine planets. So, screw anybody who thinks there's not, but a blue is a planet. If you look at the reality of it, it's obviously much more complex. They cross paths constantly. There's the sun and the solar system is actually turning in real time on top of itself. For a fourth grader or four on paper, it's, it's easier to see that and you should see that. So, you understand what the problem set is, but in the reality of it, it requires lots of taskforce to understand a very complex situation. Great way to explain that support versus sustain. I'm going to do this whole definition thing on you really quick, tell us the difference between support versus sustain.

Guest: Tim Britt (22m 24s):

Well I think the supporting and sustaining, I don't know if there's really that broad of a difference, right. But I think sustainment is the goal. Right? Supporting it is one thing, but I think sustains a much stronger action. Mike Smith, the other operations section chief on one of the other national IMATS, right, one of the first things that he mentored me on was don't start something you can't sustain, especially in the delivery of commodities, per se, where you have an impacted population.

It's one day they come somewhere for MREs and water or blankets or tarps. Then the next day they come and it's not there, right? Because you only had the limited amount or, you know what I mean? So, whenever you start, you have to be able to sustain, then that's got to help those that you can help, but keep that in mind if you can wait 12 hours or 10 hours to get it, get it right. Maybe that's the better choice. I like to look at it from us from future ops, and it's normally in the mass care. How long is this mass care shelter mission going to be? Can those people who are survivors themselves going to be able to sustain that shelter operation at the local level? Or are we going to have to augment that beyond the state capabilities? Because you can't be late to need on that.

Host: John Scardena (24m 10s):

Okay. I'm going to pick on you a little bit. It's never a smart idea to pick on Tim Britt, but I'm going to pick on you a little bit and it's really picking on FEMA. Future ops are really just planning and most of planning and FEMA is just documentation. So, like I find that the terminology is kind of like… that term is used a lot with FEMA of future plan and future ops and well, let's just create your plan and understand, okay, we're going to put people in a shelter, which means we need food, we need water. How long can we live there with kids? Should we put it in a flood zone? Probably not. So, there’s a lot of planning goes along with that, but yeah, that is future ops. This is like I said, it's a problem. It's always a problem.

Guest: Tim Britt (24m 60s):

Right? So, I think over the last two years at a minimum, we've been able to do some engagement with analytics, smarter people than what you would say, what you would normally associate with theme of planning, right. Giving them the tools, showing them, and utilizing analytic tools and methodology to be able to project out how long that POD mission's going to last and utilizing that national business EOC and grocery input, and, you know, when is food going to be available.

Where's that fine line between providing commodities that are readily available as part of the recovery of that impacted region and charting that out to give us an idea what that future feeding commodity operation is going to look like. Right. Then also as part of the future ops, or in my mind, are cascading events. Or if this thing continues to trend this way, the shelter's going to be in the fire, right? I mean, cause by fire behavior and using buyer behavior tools to inform operational decisions that are, you know, 5, 10, 15 days out, another future off thing, right. That we're doing really well now, is bringing in the IRC or the kind of inner agency recovery coordination piece and bring it in early, you know, there's no bigger future off, up then long-term recovery, right? I mean, us being able to inform and hand off that capability to that IRC branch now, I think we're getting better every day at what we're learning and applying lessons learned and with our operations. Like you said, I'm not going to disagree with what you said as a snapshot in time, but I think we're getting better. I think that’s important you know.

Host: John Scardena (27m 19s):

That's a good call-out and I will say that when I worked with informed leaders at FEMA, those informed leaders like yourself would try to use analytics to figure out what was going to happen. The cascading effects, whether it's cascading is not usually paired with something negative, but there is an impact to what you do and trying to figure out what the impact will be based off of courses of action. The more you can use analytics and decision-making, this is what, this is what I tell people. I keep telling people, it's three things. It's like why I think Doberman has like figured out like this amazing niche.

If you take data, training, and experience, you're going to have a perfect emergency manager. You need to be able to be smart enough to say, I don't know everything. You start to grab, gather all the information, whether it's different stakeholders, looking at geospatial information, cascading events, whatever. So, you're starting to pull in all the data, training, you got to be really good at your job. So, you had to practice constantly and the last part is, sometimes there's just no substitute besides I've been doing this for 30 years, trust me, X is going to happen. Andy, John just shared that on our episode, talking about that in a similar fashion where somebody said, Hey, I've got to follow my gut and that's after they looked at all the data.

 

You take those three things and you're going to have a very proficient emergency manager, an emergency management group. I think if FEMA is pushing more into that realm of getting experience, training, and analytics, I think that's all great news. I will still say though, that the planning section, I don't know how much the planning section actually does planning, planning based off of analytics, right. So like if they're pushing that direction, that's phenomenal for sure.

Guest: Tim Britt (29m 17s):

Yeah. Right. No, I agree, right. Like I said, we're trying to get better. We're leveraging talented people on our team to fill those roles. You know, Patrick McGuinn was a planning support, Cameron Sterrett, a really bright planner builds a concept of operations for us. Like I said, we're getting better, better because we're demanding more too. So, I like that, yeah that’s great.

Host: John Scardena (29m 55s):

Oh man, I have so many thoughts based off of that. First of all, Patrick McGuinn and Cam Sterrett, phenomenal emergency managers. In terms of the planning section, the emergency support unit leader is the most emergency manager kind of vault really on the team, to be honest, they're the ones looking at all the plans and creating a plan based off of that. So, there you go and very smart to hire Cameron to replace Patrick. Wow, that was genius.

Guest: Tim Britt (30m 23s):

Yeah and it didn't take a genius to do that though.

Host: John Scardena (30m 33s):

Pretty obvious choice. I think that people like Patrick and Cameron, people like Kevin Coleman, people like you and several others, I think what sets people like that apart, I've been really looking at this because we actually, we obviously try to hire really talented people here and Franzia economy, man, she's off the charts. But I think this thrive for wanting to know more and willing to do something about it. I remember seeing you at the IMAT and like, most people being super bored and you're like, man, I'm so busy.

And I'm like, what? But you were just like that thirst for knowledge and wanting to do things right and to have that work ethic, Cameron's like that, man, Cameron is one of these dudes, let's be real. He wouldn't have FEMA Corps. FEMA Corps, that program is mediocre at best, went into peace Corps, phenomenal program, but it requires a lot of self-starting effort. So, he goes on to the national team with not a, I would consider an expert level of understanding of what emergency management is, but within the six months he was already beyond most people like that. That’s who he is and to your credit, I mean, by the way you talked to Cam Sterrett, you get to about 12 seconds before he brings up Tim Britt. Oh, Tim Brett, man, I love where he's blah, blah. I'm like, are you sure you're not? The deputy is like, are you trying to get, no, he’s a big fan of you. Again, it goes back to that train of thought, talking too much, but well done too, for setting that standard. I have a question is, kind of my Q and A with Tim Brett here. I keep hearing lately from some emergency managers, I disagree with it, but I want to hear your thoughts. They say emergency managers should not be involved with response as a guy whose entire job is response and who, obviously I like response. What would you say to that? Without just laughing them out of the room, what are your thoughts on that?

Guest: Tim Britt (32m 56s):

Well, I think that when you're looking from an emergency management perspective, even with FEMA, even with my role, right? So you bring it down, there's the crisis management component of this, where your fire, your law, your public works, right? They're the subject matter experts dealing with that crisis, right. But there's a consequence management part. I think as an emergency manager, your back, your situational awareness, understanding the situation, applying the right capability to it. One of the times the emergency manager has a direct line to whatever that governor, the city manager, the county board of supervisors, you know, that governmental component and they're looking for information related to the incident.

So, there's that ESF five, you know, capability that role that you fill with providing information that links that public affairs component does that alert warning. So yeah, you have to be, when you use at core capabilities, were those lists, right? You have to be involved in response. Then just the actual management of, and the consequences that come out of that are people being evacuated. Do they need the sheltering, you know, as a mass care, the grant programs, right. That put that thing back together. That was that impacted through public assistance or other grants. You know, I mean, that's the training, right? That can tie all that together into one organization that lives under that emergency management umbrella. Yeah.

Host: John Scardena (34m 52s):

I agree with that. It's so obvious to me, but what I think, what happens is they think, oh man, I love the crisis versus consequence management. I think what happens is either they have a crisis background or they don't have a response. They haven't been working directly with a response. They might work in a response, but it's not seeing that coordination that has to happen that the, like the IMS, is kind of this funny thing, because it's both strategic and tactical, definitely strategic for obvious reasons. But tactical, because you're literally working with the direct people who are involved.

I've been on this train of thought and thinking about like, okay, how do I not laugh them out of the room, but try to understand where they're coming from. I think what they're trying to say is mitigation and preparedness needs to be much more focused on. So I would say that the most time consuming thing an emergency manager should do is focus on mitigation. Mitigation should be much more focused on when you should stop disasters from happening for sure. But the most important function of an emergency manager is life-sustaining right. We're here, we're in the business of saving and sustaining lives, life, property, and continuity of operations. You'll have no more like a real moment than helping somebody muck something out of their home or putting them up in a shelter because they have nowhere else to go like most important versus my most time consuming.

Guest: Tim Britt (36m 29s):

Right? I mean, you're in mitigation and preparedness until you're not right. That's a hundred miles an hour, right? Like really, when you start talking about this is where I'm envious, right? If the county or city emergency manager, I would love to get a fire, right? Identify this threat, start planning, immediate actions. Hey my community, I want them to be able to execute this through external affairs. You know, when this event happens, incident happens, immediate actions by not only the crisis folks, fire, public works, they're doing their thing, but citizens, right.

Guest: Tim Britt (37m 19s):

They are paying us to say, hey, protect us, right. Inform us, tell us what we need to do. I would if I lived next to like a nuclear power plant, right? If there’s some sort of nuclear threat, it's an accident or an actual nation state threat that is involved and you're telling somebody in and around that impact area, Hey, I need you to shelter in place for 24 hours, right. They should know that before the incident, right. But if you tell me that thing just blew up over there, all that's on fire, but I need you to shelter in place because that's all that fallout and stuff has to happen first. Then if you just tell me the day off, that was some sort of messaging, I'm like, yeah, that's cool when I'm out. And I'm running from that thing that I see you there. Yeah. So, I just think that engagement at the local level and doing the preparedness piece, the THIRA evaluations and having putting plans in place, and then articulating them to the citizens that fall under your jurisdictional boundaries. I think that's the wind man. Like that's where you really move the needle, you know, emergency manager.

Host: John Scardena (38m 39s):

I liked that. I like moving the needle. The idea of that you brought up a lot of really great points today. You talked about, obviously crisis versus consequence management, which we were just talking about. We were talking about the need for response. We've talked about kind of what the national strike team does is an overview on the operational perspective that can be applied across the board. So, we covered a lot of really great topics today. I just want to give you the last word. If you're going to give advice to emergency managers out in the field right now, what would you give? What advice would you give?

Guest: Tim Britt (39m 9s):

I would say first off is be brilliant at the basics and be able to execute on that, on that consequence management. Then going back to what you said on that, the situational awareness, and why is that important? Right. Is understanding the situation as it relates to operations. As you know, in big events, we operate off planning, assumptions and planning, assumptions come along with push of resources. The quicker we can understand the current situation, we can turn off that articulated to our higher headquarters. Then we can stop the push of resources based on assumptions and do a pool of required resource requirements and fulfilling requirements, actual things that we need to apply to problems and fill those gaps for in our case, the state, right, or the territory or the Tribe that we're supporting. So, I think just that situational awareness, be brilliant at the basics, understand the situation, you know, and turn that, push it into a pull. I think that's a win for response.

Host: John Scardena (40m 27s):

It's a good thing that the mics are connected right now, because I could probably just drop it right now. That's a great way to end on, be brilliant at the basics, situational awareness, mitigate until you're not nearly going a hundred miles an hour. Right. Tim, thanks so much for coming back on the show, man. It's always a pleasure.

Guest: Tim Britt (40m 46s):

Hey John, thanks for having me.

Host: John Scardena (40m 47s):

Absolutely. So, if you liked this episode, would you should have, you need to give us that five-star rating and subscribe. If you have questions for Tim, you can send us an email at info@dobermanemg.com, or you can be brave enough to put your question out on social media. We'd love to be able to see that there for Disaster Tough Podcast or for government emergency management. If you want to work with Doberman Emergency Management, you want somebody who has training experience and a lot of data to back up their plans, then you should contact us again at info@dobermanemg.com and we'll see you next week.