This is a throwaway account for privacy.

I am an EM planner and recently learned that I make about $10-15k less than the people with my exact job title/duties in all of the surrounding jurisdictions with an equivalent position, including the smaller/more rural jurisdictions. I make about $9k less than the next-lowest paid person in my office, and quite frankly I have a lot more responsibilities than he does.

My position is entirely funded by a DHS grant. Does anybody have any advice on asking for a raise in a grant-funded position? Given everything going on with grants right now, I’m prepared for a “no,” but is there anything else I should know before I ask?

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone. Let me first apologize for this possibly being a repeat question or this not being the appropriate place to ask.

I am trying to get some information on the Planning Cadre overall and how deployments look for them. I'm coming into the cadre as a unit leader and wanted some insight to how things actually are.

I don't see a lot of in depth information about the planning cadre as much as others, so I was just hoping I could hear about different people's experiences and what to expect.

I am especially interested in understanding what a supervisory role looks like and typical timeframes of deployments.

I know the new administration probably changes what it used to be versus what it is now, but any information would be great to have.

Student here, trying to understand the situational-awareness side of disaster response rather than guess at it.

In the first hours-to-days after an event you worked (flood, hurricane, quake, fire):

• How did you actually find out which areas were flooded or which structures were damaged? Ground crews reporting back, aerial/satellite imagery, crowdsourced maps, a mix?
• How long before you had a picture complete enough to prioritize where to send people?
• Where did that process fall short? Was it a data problem, a "we couldn't see it because of cloud/weather" problem, or a "the info existed but didn't reach the right people" problem?

I keep reading post-mortems (Tohoku, recent US floods) that say the full damage picture came together "piece by piece" over days. Curious whether that matches your experience or whether it's better than the reports make it sound. Tell me if I've got it wrong.

Not selling anything. Just learning how it really works.

Working in the nonprofit sector has shown me that humanitarian crises test much more than an organization’s ability to deliver aid. They test leadership, coordination, decision-making, and accountability.

During flood-response work in Pakistan, one of the biggest lessons I observed was the importance of clearly defined responsibilities between partner organizations and teams. When conditions change quickly, unclear roles can slow down the response.

Another important lesson is field presence. Leadership during a humanitarian crisis cannot happen entirely from an office. Understanding what teams and affected communities are experiencing on the ground can significantly improve decision-making.

Transparency is equally important. Organizations need to communicate clearly about what was delivered, where resources went, what challenges were encountered, and what impact was achieved.

Finally, humanitarian leadership should recognize the people doing the work on the ground. Successful crisis response is rarely the achievement of one individual—it comes from coordinated teams, healthcare professionals, volunteers, partners, donors, and local communities.

**I’d be interested to hear from people working in humanitarian response: What leadership challenges have you seen during disaster-response operations?**

I am a trans man considering taking the hazmat ops and tech courses at CDP. I'm trying to get a better sense of the living situation on campus before I commit though. With the current political climate, I'm a bit hesitant to stay in shared living spaces on a federal campus in Alabama.

I know from their website that the rooms are assigned based on sex and the bathrooms are shared. How many rooms share a bathroom and what is the layout like? Are you likely to encounter your "neighbors" in the shared bathroom, or is it a shared single occupancy space? Are the rooms assigned based on who is there at a given time, or are parts of the building separated by sex such as floors, wings, etc? Are there areas beyond just the lodging that I should be aware of as a trans person?

If any other trans people see this, what was it like for you at CDP or other similar locations?

Does anyone know why the ICS 800 course is still not available? It was unavailable last year prior to the government shutdown.

Apparently USNORTHCOM has a new initiative called Civil Support to Military Operations that plans to bring local and state EM agencies into military support. Haven’t even seen a press release yet, but I got invited to a webinar about it. Here’s the link for anyone interested.

https://www.crisislab.io/products/emergency-management-intelligence-in-support-of-homeland-defense

So, I run the data management program in our airport’s Emergency Management division. I’m tasked with getting the team data-focused. These are emergency managers, data is boring to them compared to dealing with emergencies. As fellow EMs, what would get you excited about it? I’m considering gamifying some processes to make them more interesting (like a “data champions” program with leaderboards and such). Any suggestions?

We want to update our accountability processes across a few facilities and we're back to the discussion around an EMS app/platform to replace or augment our paper ICS 211s. I'm all for the real-time headcount and active tracking, but some of my coworkers are pushing for an EMS with offline mode. 

I'm 50/50 on the offline part. How reliable is it? Some platforms we tried fell short in exercises/incidents because of saturated networks or dead zones. Is that really a setback for online mode or are we just using the wrong tool? 

Not sure if I'm overthinking it or expecting too much. Should we stick to paper? Or maybe there's a process/SOP I'm not catching.

Does anyone else have an EMT as their clinical advisor? It doesn’t seem like scope of practice would be remotely enough.

I just accepted a County Liaison Officer for Dallam County! I’m very excited about the opportunity. For those who are County Liaison Officers in Texas what should I expect? Any feedback is appreciated

Hey fellow EMs!
I clearly got off to the wrong start with my last post, so I’m wanting to start this over and get genuine feedback from everyone.
For those of you that didn’t see it, I’m creating a card game for emergency management. It’s called Ground Truth, and it’s an adversarial card game where one person plays the EM and the other person plays the hazard. I have two hazards: Wildfire and Pandemic.
The EM starts with 15 staffing points and can use 3 action points per round. You can replenish staffing through mutual aid cards.
The Hazard has intensity points they can use to escalate the scenario and try to stop the EM in their tracks. It is 12 rounds, complete with a round tracker where you log your decisions, what injects you did not address and why, and can use it for an after action.

I want to get y’all’s feedback on the initial cards designs. These were done by Milli Pooley, a great graphic artist based out of New Zealand. I’m not here to post links or anything like that, unless asked.

For those from the last post: all AI content has been eradicated. I had a great copy-editor step in, and the real artwork is now live.

Please let me know your thoughts.

I'm going next week and always look forward to it. I've sent a message to student services a few days ago but they have not replied.
It's been a few years since I was last there. Does anyone know if they have shampoo, conditioner, body wash in the bathrooms? Hand soap for the sink? I also don't recall if there was a hair dryer in the room.
Trying to keep my packing (and liquids) light and prefer to avoid a WalMart run on Sunday night if I don't have to.
Thanks much!

TLDR: I’m building out app style overview page for commercial building disaster preparedness plans and want feedback on the top five sections that should be visible first during an emergency. What would you include?

I’m doing some product research around disaster preparedness plans for commercial buildings. Not trying to sell anything, just trying to understand what facility managers, property managers, building owners, and emergency response teams would actually want quick access to when something goes wrong.

If you opened a digital preparedness plan during a water loss, fire event, storm, power outage, or other emergency, what should be on the first overview page?

My current thinking is:

Key emergency contacts
Property manager, facility lead, maintenance, security, ownership, insurance contact, and preferred vendors. Ideally with tap-to-call or tap-to-email.

Utility shutoffs and life-safety systems
Main water, gas, electric, sprinkler riser, fire panel, generator, elevator controls, and mechanical rooms. Ideally with photos, location notes, and clear access instructions.

Access information
Main entrances, service entrances, gates, lockboxes, parking, staging areas, roof access, loading docks, and restricted areas. Sensitive access codes would need to be handled securely.

Building documents and plans
Floor plans, emergency procedures, inspection records, insurance documents, vendor agreements, and other files people may need quickly.

Building overview / operational context
Building type, square footage, floors, occupancy, special hazards, priority areas, vulnerable occupants, and any notes responders should know before arriving.

A few questions:

- What would you want visible on the first screen
- Would you organize this by tiles, tabs, checklist, or map pins?
- Would a site access map showing parking, entrances, shutoffs, generators, and staging areas be useful?
- What information should be available offline or through a QR code?
- What should not be shown too openly because of privacy or security concerns?

If you were designing this for a real commercial property, what would your top five sections be?

Assam faced one of the worst flood in it’s history, claiming 100+ lives and neary 100k displaced. Relief was plenty but it arrived without coordination, which got me thinking. So I made a platform called Banpani.org (literally means flood in assamese language) - a open source community based platform for relief workers and NGOs to properly coordinate relief. It sort of worked, so far I know around 5 familes recieved proper relief because of this.

Got me thinking I should build it for other disasters also. Made a map for Colombia earthquake, and within 5 days, 1000+ people visited. Not sure if it is working there, I am not putting any tracking mechanism. But I knew this was not sustainable, as I didn’t know the lanuage and anyways Banpani is open source in Github.

So, not it is a relief management free software for India. Even if something like Covid 2.0 comes, we can be slightly better prepared to know who needs what and where this time.

This is not a company, this is just 3 friends trying to give it back. We don’t plan to raise funds, or do anything ‘money’. The limited expenses will be borne out of our pocket, atleast till the time we can.

Request from the group - would want suggestions on how to take this forward so that maximum people can be benefitted. Its open source, we’ll need volunteers also.