In emergency management, we frequently use the word “event”–and we’re almost always wrong.

It might seem silly, but there is a difference between incidents and events…and it’s often misunderstood or ignored. Below are three examples of the use of the word “event”:

• “The lessons we have learned from such catastrophic events as the attacks of September 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 demonstrate…”
• “These assessments are conducted in counties affected by the disaster event [which was an earthquake]”
• “The mission of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Special Security Event (NSSE)…”

Can you guess which sentence correctly uses the word “event”?

Hint: it has NOTHING to do with a disaster…

To improve understanding, I’ve created the simple graphic below with the NIMS definition and examples of an event:

The DHS Lexicon also defines event as: “a planned, non-emergency activity occurring in a particular place during a particular interval of time.” (DHS, Lexicon: Terms and Definitions, October 23, 2007, p. 10).

It turns out that events are scheduled and they are NOT EMERGENCIES. The confusion might stem from emergency managers with military experience since the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Related Terms, 2007 defines “catastrophic event” as: “Any natural or man-made incident, including terrorism, which results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the population, infrastructure, environment, economy, national morale, and/or government functions.”

While the military definition of a “catastrophic event” quickly defers to the definition of an incident, it still harms our collective competency as emergency managers. As emergency managers, a major part of our job is to improve preparedness/readiness through training and consistent application of best practices. Therefore, if we aren’t using jargon or industry terms properly, we’re doing a disservice to ourselves and our field.

While “event” has nothing to do with emergencies, incidents have everything to do with emergencies:

Now, just because an event is planned doesn’t mean it doesn’t require some of the very same resources as an incident. For example, few wildfires receive as many resources as the inauguration of the President of the United States of America. As emergency managers, we spend a lot of time preventing events from turning into incidents (like planning and positioning of resources so that fans from a sports game [event] do not start a riot [an incident]). While events can turn into incidents, incidents really can’t become events.

Hope this was helpful! In a future post, I’ll address what “verbiage” really means…

I’ve seen this meme a lot recently and thought it might be fun to make one for emergency managers!

For clarity, the “what my family thinks I do” is a guy on a segway handing out water bottles… and the “what I actually do” pic is from the famous cowboys herding cats video.

Today FEMA released “The State of FEMA” as an overview of FEMA’s vision and strategy (with a lot of Whole Community approach). It’s a smart idea, especially since (as the report quickly mentions) FEMA responded to more disasters in 2011 than ever before (98 major disaster declarations, 26 emergency declarations, and 112 fire management assistance grant (FMAG) declarations). There’s no doubt FEMA has been undergoing a profound transformation under Mr. Fugate and it’s pretty impressive. Among all else, Mr. Fugate has transitioned FEMA from a federal response to a NATIONAL response (with national planning/preparedness and prevention/protection efforts now in full swing).

Highlights include

• National Disaster Recovery Framework (NDFR) released
• National Mass Care Strategy developed
• FEMA Qualification System implementation
• Establishment of Presidential Policy Directive (PPD)-8 Program Executive Office (PEO)
• FEMA helped train more than 428,000 individuals as part of the Community Emergency Response Teams (CERT) program. Overall, more than 1.3 million CERT volunteer hours were recorded in 2011
• Emergency Alert System was tested nationally for the first time

The document even provides explanation of FEMA’s guiding principles, the FEMA culture, and strategic priorities (particularly impressive when the document routinely makes statements like “In 2012, FEMA will…”). It’s rare in government to see such assertive (or as FEMA and MSNBC puts it “forward leaning”) statements.

More than ever before, FEMA is emphasizing comprehensive emergency management that includes community members. The document pretty much mentions community engagement efforts on every page. But it’s not just anecdotes, FEMA uses hard data to explain the amount of funding and response efforts across the nation (see map below). The document provides data about training, program implementation, and even mitigation and IPAWS.

This document does an excellent job of explaining what FEMA is doing, how it is doing it, what the results have been, and exactly what FEMA plans to do in 2012. The military talks about transformation quite a bit, but I couldn’t be more impressed by the transformation occurring at FEMA–especially during a year with the most disasters on record. It’s an extraordinary time at FEMA now and I have no doubt it’s to the benefit of Americans now, but also for future generations.

I’ve been a professional planner since 2005 for emergencies, continuity of operations, and strategic recovery plans. When I got engaged last December, I knew wedding planning would be a new frontier. As I’m starting the wedding planning process, I can’t help but notice how ICS is applicable to many of the roles and responsibilities. Just for kicks, I developed the ICS chart below…

I’m sure there are many other slots that could be activated (lodging, food unit, etc). Just goes to show how ICS is truly scalable and flexible.