Latest news with #emergencyplanning
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Sioux Falls Emergency Manager preparing for the end of FEMA
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — President Donald Trump announced plans to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the 2025 hurricane season. That means states, counties and cities will have to develop their own plans for handling the aftermath of emergencies. Damage in Sibley, IA after near 70 mph winds Regan Smith knew FEMA's demise was a possibility. So the man in charge of emergency response in Sioux Falls has been doing his homework. He's been talking with other emergency managers, trying to get a handle on what is ahead. 'We don't know, right now there is a lot of uncertainty, a lot of policy debate going on, so we are waiting to hear what might actually happen,' Smith said. Smith says on the local level, not much will change. Sioux Falls has a preparedness, response and recovery plan in place. He says people often misunderstand the role of FEMA during a disaster. FEMA is not first responders, they don't have an army of people that are responding to these types of things that happen at the local level and then at the state level. 'Their role is to coordinate federal resources to assist state and local government, and individuals and businesses with funding,' said Smith. Last week, South Dakota Governor Larry Rhoden created a state disaster preparedness task force. Without FEMA, states would need to develop their own disaster response teams, manage stockpiles of essential supplies, and coordinate federal assistance. Changes are coming, and during and after disasters, states are trying to figure out what life without FEMA will look like. 'There is a lot of talk and speculation, we just don't know,' said Smith. 'No Kings' protests on Saturday in 8 SD cities Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
CTV News
27-05-2025
- General
- CTV News
Disaster response plan agreed on by Lethbridge County and several nearby municipalities
Lethbridge County and surrounding municipalities have agreed on a new disaster response plan to allow for a co-ordinated response in the region. Lethbridge County and surrounding municipalities have agreed on a new disaster response plan. The new plan will allow for a co-ordinated response to disasters in the region. The regional emergency management plans include the county, Coalhurst, Nobleford, Picture Butte and Barons. Some disasters that might call for a group response include grass fires, floods and train derailments. Historically, the neighbouring municipalities have worked together on disaster response. But the new agreement formalizes this relationship and provides a framework for responses. 'It's just a really great opportunity for us to work with our partners. We're stronger, more resilient together,' said Breea Tamminga, Lethbridge County emergency management co-ordinator. 'It also expands our resources that we can tap into in the event of an emergency or disaster.' Lethbridge County and surrounding municipalities have agreed on a new disaster response plan to allow for a co-ordinated response in the region. Lethbridge County and surrounding municipalities have agreed on a new disaster response plan to allow for a co-ordinated response in the region. Smaller, everyday emergencies will still be handled by each community fire and emergency services.
Telegraph
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Give vegans special rations in national emergency, says crisis adviser
Vegans, vegetarians and Muslims should receive special food rations if disaster strikes Britain, according to a food crisis expert. Prof Tim Lang said people needed to eat familiar food in times of shock, and the government must cater for dietary requirements. An emeritus professor of food policy at the University of London, Prof Lang is an adviser to the National Preparedness Commission, an emergency planning committee set up in the wake of the Covid pandemic. 'If you want people to carry on not being in psychological shock, they need to have things that they're familiar with and comfortable with, not to experience the new,' Prof Lang told an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales. 'They have just experienced a lot of things – explosions, energy outage or whatever it is – and you want them to have things that they know they can eat. 'You don't want people used to a halal diet to eat a non-halal diet, for example, or vegetarians and vegans to have to eat meat. You've got to have some flexibility about what is normal now. It's very different to 1940,' he said. Prof Lang shared the Hay stage with Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ and the author of How To Survive A Crisis: Lessons in Resilience and Avoiding Disaster. Sir David warned that Britain was more vulnerable than ever to an attack on its infrastructure, saying: 'Historically, crises have arisen and the human race has survived. 'But what's different now is that we're more vulnerable. If you've got complex systems, they are very difficult to fix when things start to go wrong. You just need to think about cyber: would you have guessed that Marks & Spencer would have £300 million taken off their bottom line by a ransomware attack? 'So we are more vulnerable and we will struggle at the moment if some of these things actually happen. You just need to look at extreme weather events, never mind what could happen in the longer term.' Differing diets Prof Lang said planning by other European countries, including Germany and Switzerland, was 'getting into the minutiae about different diets, different ethnicities, different income groups and so on'. Crisis planning should take into account what people eat, he said, adding: 'What are your fears? What are your habits? What are you used to? What do you consider 'normal' food?' In the Second World War, the nation accepted the basic foodstuffs distributed as part of rationing. But Prof Lang said: 'Now, Britain's favourite food for children is pizza. It's a different world today.' He suggested that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had failed to grasp the importance of Britain's diverse eating habits. 'Getting prepared is about anticipating and part of that has got to mean anticipating the public. You can't assume Defra knows what the public is doing, or thinks, or its diversity,' he said. 'I want some new committees, and existing committees like the scientific advisory committee on nutrition, to actually analyse British diets and say 'OK, we need to have different dietary advice for different conditions'.' He also criticised the previous government for issuing basic advice in May last year that every household should stockpile three days' worth of unperishable food. 'This made me tear what hair I had out, because we need to think very carefully about what sort of food in what sort of circumstances,' he said. 'Can you cook? Maybe the electricity system has just gone. Let's think through the detail.' Food storage concerns Prof Lang said the absence of food storage in Britain would be keenly felt in the event of a crisis. 'Britain feeds itself from nine companies who account for 94.5 per cent of all food purchased,' he said. 'Those companies are very competitive, very powerful, they control long supply chains which have all been managed in an increasingly integrated way to get rid of storage. 'They go literally from the farm through to that point when you buy it in the supermarket, and your bill is re-ordering the food. They've spent 50 years, the logistics industry, getting rid of storage. 'What if it had been Tesco [hit by a cyber attack], not M&S? Tesco sells nearly a third of all food. If that goes down…' Sir David referred to the 'paradox of warning', when a known threat is looming but there is no political impetus to solve it until it is too late. He said: 'There is a terrible phenomenon which is that we don't actually think this will happen because it's our policy that it shouldn't happen. This is my explanation of Oct 7, when Hamas attacked Israel. They weren't expecting it, it was a surprise, because in the policy the Israeli government was following, it couldn't happen because that wasn't the policy. 'You can think yourself into hubris, complacency… and my worry is that we are rather complacent, and we'll get the wake-up call when suddenly we flick the switch and the lights don't come on because of some cyber attack or Russian attack or whatever it might be.' Sir David said planning must also take into account 'the psychological resilience of the public' in the event of a crisis, and expressed doubt that Gen Z or Gen Alpha could cope as well as older people. He asked: 'Is this generation or the upcoming generation more resilient than our generation was? You'll get two views but my hunch is probably a bit less, unless the youngsters have actually been abroad and done aid work or whatever it might be. When bad things happen, they're going to feel it more.'
Telegraph
11-05-2025
- Health
- Telegraph
I'm a national emergency planner. This is how I cope in a personal crisis
Lucy Easthope, 46, walked through her front door in 2009, leaned her back against her hallway wall and slid down to the floor, overwhelmed with grief. Her blood pressure had plummeted, her legs had given way – a response she'd only ever seen happen in films. She'd just been in hospital, where she'd been told that she'd had a miscarriage and was overwhelmed with grief. Her reaction to the personal crisis was dramatically different to her response to the national crises she faces head on through her role as an emergency planner. 'You have to show that you are not going to be a terrible wreck,' the Liverpudlian tells me from her home in Shropshire. And for good reason – Easthope has formed part of the response to almost every disaster involving British citizens over the last few decades: 9/11, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the 2005 London Underground bombings, the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, the Salisbury poisonings in 2018, the Covid pandemic and the 2024 Southport stabbings, to name a few. Her job involves either preparing, often sitting in her office planning for future emergencies, or responding, which can involve providing immediate on-site response, advising the most senior figures in government and supporting communities long after an event has left the news cycle. It's a role – taken up after achieving a law degree, a PhD in medicine and master's degree in disaster management – that makes her uniquely well placed to navigate personal crisis, though you 'would be a robot' if you could have the same measured response when crisis hits at home, which Easthope has also seen much of, including five miscarriages (she went on to have two children, aged 10 and 14) and her father's death in 2023. But that doesn't mean that her career can't help to translate into coping with personal tragedy. 'We make big, long lists of all the things that can go wrong in the world and then work out what to do about them,' Easthope writes in her new book, Come What May: Life-Changing Lessons for Coping with Crisis. 'We think about the winter in the spring.' Here's how you can apply her principles to get through personal crises and momentary disasters. 1. Crises happen to all of us – but planning is crucial None of us can really ever know how we will react until disaster strikes but there are small things you can do to prepare for a situation. As an emergency planner, Easthope painstakingly plans for the worst, then reviewing those plans so they're ready when national disaster strikes, whether it's a collapsed bridge or unexploded ordnance. But she also applies the same approach to her children's school calendars, planning with military precision and keeping an eye for any trouble ahead. While you don't need to devote hours to imagining every emergency that you could face, it can be helpful to prepare for the two big things, Easthope says. These are being stuck in your home or not being able to get home, which recently happened to tens of millions of people across Spain and Portugal, when the countries lost power for 10 hours. If you're stuck at home, you need to make sure you have everything that you could need. 'You want light, so the charged torches and the charged hurricane lamps,' she says. She urges against using candles because of the fire risk they pose. 'You want food and snacks – anything you can make without cooking,' she adds. 'Everyone always adds in, rightly so, the board games and playing cards.' Easthope keeps all of these emergency items in a cupboard at home. Leaving the house in a hurry, or being left stranded, is another common crisis, whether a result of a power outage, car breakdown or cancelled train. 'Think about things you'd grab if you had to leave home now in a hurry – perhaps tonight and tomorrow's medication. I always have a phone and phone charger.' She also recommends adding shoes – 'I have seen many people exit their house in their socks' – a spare house key, first aid kit, thermals and insurance documents to a disaster 'go bag'. 2. Be ready for what comes after the immediate crisis Regardless of the disaster – whether it sweeps the nation like a pandemic or terrorist attack, or is personal such as widowhood or pregnancy loss – they can all be understood under the framework of the 'disaster recovery graph', originally created by American scholars around 70 years ago. It shows that, soon after a disaster, there is an upward slope, representing an improvement in feelings, followed by a crash and eventually a gentle incline, Easthope explains. 'It's not a grief cycle (like 'two weeks on Wednesday you'll be angry') but it's a helpful explainer for what's inevitable after a major event.' The phase immediately after a national disaster or personal loss is often known as the 'honeymoon phase', according to this framework, Easthope says. It's a period full of hugs, compassion and an outpouring of support. For the person at the centre of the crisis, this can cause a flood of oxytocin (the love hormone), but it's followed by a slump, she explains. The slump is often a time of anger, distress and pain. 'It goes back and forth and it's not a failure if you slide back down,' Easthope says. In her work, Grenfell Tower is a physical manifestation of the slump. 'The skeleton of the tower, shrouded in white material, still stands, haunting the skyline', Easthope writes. 'This disaster is one of the few I have seen where there was no honeymoon. It hurtled straight into utter misery and despair.' 'We did a big public meeting [in Southport] in December about the slump because what people want is to hear that each month it will get better and you're delivering the reverse – really it's going to get harder, for example often after a first anniversary.' But, finally, there is an up tick when things should get better. Though, in the case of Grenfell, 'any up tick will always be perilously fragile', she says. The graph challenges the myth that you will go from a difficult time to a really great time in the aftermath of any loss, she says. It's been a revelation for people because it helps people make sense of what's going on, Easthope says. 3. Don't fall victim to wishful thinking In the face of a crisis, it's important not to fall victim to excessive wishful thinking, or 'hopium' as Easthope calls it. It's been a common failure in many national incidents, such as the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, which officials had hoped would be a handleable weather event. 'Hopium fills the ears with cloth,' Easthope writes. 'It is ultimately perhaps best described as an over-estimation of the positives of a situation.' That doesn't mean she's immune herself. 'With the miscarriages, you sit there Googling stories of people who've been told they miscarried but, in fact, there was a hidden baby in their uterus,' she says. 'I'm very in love with hope but I also want people to be very realistic. 'You need to be prepared for the reasonable worst case scenario, so for somebody that could be: 'A lot of colleagues are up for redundancy but I'm pretty hopeful it won't be me.' OK, but we need to talk about what to do if it is you,' she says. To avoid it, she recommends considering how you would handle difficult news or a critical incident – whether a job loss, power cut, sudden illness or need to rush to hospital – and discussing it out loud with your household to create a plan of how you would respond. 4. Understand that loved ones will process things in different ways Shock and grief and ultimately coming to some form of peace after a crisis can manifest in different ways among different people, Easthope notes. 'It's very divisive sometimes in families', she notes, when different family members often reach these stages at different points. Easthope's father Bob Payne, a woodwork teacher, died suddenly in April 2023. 'My mum says it took her a very long time, probably a year, which sounds bonkers for a very rational woman, to realise he wasn't going to reappear, like maybe this was some kind of really dark prank, maybe he's testing me, maybe he'll pop back,' she says. When it comes to working through grief as a family, 'you're looking all the time for little shoots of growth and joy', she says. 'The moments I see pure joy in my mum, for example, are to do with the grandchildren. So often, [it's that idea of] life goes on,' Easthope explains. 'In men's mental health, it's often growing or making things, or taking on an animal as a reason to sort of keep going and looking up.' She watches out for the moment when bereaved people can 'really properly laugh' for the first time since the loss, as a sign that they are making their way through the crisis. 'It might be the day after, it might be a year after,' she notes. Come What May by Lucy Easthope is published by Hodder Press on 15th May and available for pre-order (Hardback, £20) Six hacks so you're always prepared for a crisis 1. Prepare a disaster 'go bag' It should contain all of the basics for if you need to move in a hurry. A phone charger, spare house key, medication, underwear, non-perishable snacks, bottled water and insurance documents. Think about any pets too – the RSPCA has advice on their website for a pet emergency plan. Keep the bag in a designated place and check the contents regularly. 2. Have a plan for short power outages Keep your phone charged and consider investing in battery packs. Have torches accessible and extra batteries. Invest in thermals and pick up jumpers and sweatshirts at charity shops. 3. Start daily breathing exercises The aim is to slow the physical symptoms of anxiety and calm ourselves down. At times of stress, we often take shallow breaths. Try breathing exercises every day so they are second nature when you need them. 4. Don't spiral You might find yourself in a spiral during a crisis, looking for reasons something has happened and demanding to know why things are so unfair. Get a handle on this reaction and accept there is no reason and it is unfair. This doesn't mean you should stop finding out about the event and asking for apologies or learnings later on. 5. Go outside In the aftermath of a crisis, get outdoors – scrunch bare feet into grass or sit among some trees. Studies evaluating the benefits of immersing ourselves in nature have shown positive psychological effects, such as a drop in blood pressure and improved immune function. 6. Stay alert for scamming and fraud In the hours after a weather emergency or flood, new scams start to circulate. No area innovates faster than fraud.
