I often say that keeping people safe is the sacred obligation of government. That could be because my father was in charge of civil defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The threat was nuclear war, and Dad was tasked with urban evacuation plans and sheltering.
A few days after being elected four years ago, I took my first tour of the Anne Arundel County Emergency Operations Center (EOC), where our Office of Emergency Management (OEM) operates. I felt like a student on the first day of a dauntingly difficult course. It all seemed so complex. There was a room full of work stations, row after row of them, with computers with headphones attached to telephones, and each had the name of a county department where a representative would sit when the EOC was “activated.” There was a separate room where I could sit, or pace, and be briefed away from the chaos. My job would be making hard decisions and speaking to the press. I envisioned hurricanes, debilitating snowstorms, and yes, even nuclear attack.
Later, I attended some trainings with other county staff and was impressed by their knowledge. But I soon learned that our OEM was severely backlogged with required state- and federally-mandated disaster plans, that the few staff it had were grant-funded rather than county employees, and that during the most recent disaster, the Capital Gazette shooting, the OEM had been told by the administration to stand down and been ordered to stop the process of doing the after-action report being requested by our first responders and by emergency management planners across the country. The director at the time was Kevin Aftung, a good man who understood the problems. He appealed to me for resources and respect. He would be retiring soon, but wanted to leave the agency better than he found it.
On Friday, my schedule had me stopping into the EOC for a public tour that was taking place. I almost canceled, figuring I knew the place pretty darn well by now, but am glad I didn’t. The memories of what took place in that building during my first term in office came flooding back.
There was the first press conference with Dr. Kalyanaraman on the day we lost our first resident to COVID, the day I joined the crews taking calls in the early months of the pandemic from terrified residents, standing alongside leaders of our African American community and our police department condemning the murder of George Floyd, and EOC activations during storm surges, a tornado, and when four major festivals were taking place across the county on one day, stretching our public safety resources beyond capacity.
It was in 2020, during the first year of the pandemic, that I made the wise decision to promote Preeti Emrick to OEM Director. She made a compelling case to professionalize the operation and to slow the staff turnover by making some of her staff county employees. That decision has paid off. According to the annual report I brought home with me Friday and read over the weekend, her planners finalized eight different plans and procedures in 2022 that will guide our agencies and serve our communities during future life-threatening events. They have six more underway.
In 2022, they conducted 13 exercises, compared to 6 in 2021. In just two years they quadrupled the number of our agency EOC reps who are fully trained to federal standards. Community outreach has soared with the help of Pepper the Preparedness Pup, house of worship outreach, Hispanic outreach, and an Expo. And thanks to the team’s record-keeping and coordination of county agencies, they were able to win over $8 million in federal reimbursements for county funds that we spent in response to COVID-19.
They did all of this while taking the lead in finally launching the plan to create our county’s long-awaited, state-of-the-art Joint 911 Communications and Emergency Operations Center.
We have no way of knowing what life-threatening events will confront our county in the next four years, but visiting our EOC on Friday, seeing their team leading a tour for our residents, and reading their 2022 Annual Report gave me confidence that we are prepared.
I believe that my father would approve.
Until next week,
Steuart Pittman
Anne Arundel County Executive