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(Music playing) Virginia has been a leader in emergency management
for many, many years. I believe that in the last several years, our system has been truly
put to the test. Virginia has had, in the last several years, many different natural
disasters, some very atypical, such as the tornadoes in Southwest Virginia, the Derecho,
the East Coast earthquake that originated in Mineral, Virginia; and our emergency management
has been truly put to the test, and has fared very, very well.
I think Virginia was one of the first ones to come within the emergency management area.
Virginia is probably among the top. I'd say its within the top three if not the top five
for emergency management. We have Michael Cline as our State Coordinator, Michael has
been in it from the first. He was here 30 years ago when we were having the floods in
the mountains area, the flash floods, he was here when we had the first hurricanes, and
Mike has been one of the ones that's been directing and kept Virginia on the top.
Virginia is pretty disaster prone, we're probably in the top five, or certainly in the top 10,
but probably in the top five as far as numbers of presidential disaster declarations. So
there was something happening every few years, and sometimes it would come two or three or
four in a year, that would drive additional changes pretty much regularly as the new Governors
came in, making modifications to the disaster law and to our organization and to our ability
to respond and prepare. When I first started in emergency management,
the notification system for the City of Norfolk was a siren system which was installed after
the Cuban Missile Crisis and was basically an air raid siren, that was a notification
alert that went out, and when the sirens went out, it meant for people to turn in to their
local television radio stations to find out exactly what the pending emergency was. That
was sort of the beginning of mass notification. Prior to '69, this agency was the office of
Civil Defense. There were two iterations, one right at the end of World War II, with
the end of the war, then that agency actually stopped - went out of existence, briefly.
Then, I believe with the Korean War and certainly then with the Cold War, in the 50's, it was
brought back as the Office of Civil Defense, and continued forward that way with the five
regions I mentioned, and about 13 or 14 headquarters staff, so a very small agency, that primarily
handled civil defense: preparedness for a nuclear attack on the mainland.
In 1969, Hurricane Camille ripped through the mountains of Virginia, there was river
flooding statewide, there was some extreme flash flooding, especially in Nelson County.
Most folks are aware of the story, we lost 150-some people to that storm, in some cases,
entirely families and homes were swept off the mountainside. Essentially the agency just
wasn't prepared, the state wasn't prepared to deal with something like that. As a result
of Camille, within a few years, the size of the agency had more than doubled. In 1972,
it was renamed the Office of Emergency Services, instead of Civil Defense, and Virginia was
one of the first states that really took on that new role of being prepared to deal with
natural disasters in addition to the nuclear attack.
You know, emergency management is really a profession. And back in the early days, it
was not considered a profession. It was just considered something that somebody had to
know a little bit about to make things work. Now, it's treated as a profession, as it should
be, and a lot of the reason that localities get reimbursed for what they do, and have
the ability to recover from disasters is through the professional assistance of their local
emergency managers. So, it's not just response, but it's also preparedness, training and recovery.
The primary mission of the agency is certainly an element of response and recovery and planning
and mitigation and all of those things, but, I think the real key is to build that climate
of cooperation and coordination between all the different players because even though
we've grown, we're still a very tiny agency, and when you consider the numbers of programs
that we have to deal with, and throw the disasters in on top of that, all we can do is coordinate
the activity. The VERT is a key element these days, the
Virginia Emergency Response Team, which are people pulled in from 20 different agencies
and the private sector and the volunteer community, we have to be able to establish partnerships,
I think that's the big thing, is you have to be able to take care of the coordination
aspect of emergency management to make it work.
After 9/11, our governments, Virginia, DC, Maryland, the Governors' Office all had an
Office of Homeland Security, we called it Commonwealth Preparedness. Each of the agencies
then had membership into what we call the National Capital Region, it was a "braintrust."
And we started developing, through the UASI grants, planning and strategies. After that,
what I started hearing and what became more prevalent for education was homeland security
bachelor's degrees. With 9/11 and with Katrina and Hugo and Andrew
and Sandy, all of those, it's brought the importance of full-time emergency management
for all hazards. I'm reminded of the fact that we come in all, from all walks of life
and all shapes and sizes and we do it for varying reasons, there's the volunteer size,
there's the career size, and Virginia has managed to merge all of that together into
a really, really fine system, so it's important as we recognize the 40th anniversary, we also
recognize all the leaders across the state, local, state and and federal leaders that
we have good relationships with, that we work with on a regular basis, and that when disaster
strikes, we know we can count on, to make sure our citizens are safe, to make sure that
property is secure, and to make sure that we are giving the best possible service to
the citizens of the Commonwealth, and that we return everyone back to as close to normal
as we can after the disaster has struck. (Music playing)