Day 1: KEYNOTE: Disrupting FEMA— Innovating Service Delivery in the Era of Climate Disasters with Brock Long

 

“We need to stop looking at people in this country being victims all the time, but actually being the true first responder in every community, in every situation.” —Brock Long

 

2024 WILDFIRE LEADERSHIP SUMMIT

 

Disasters are hitting our communities harder and more frequently than ever before. We can’t keep relying on the same old playbook – it’s time for a fresh, innovative approach. Disaster management needs to move beyond just responding to crises and instead focus on empowering local communities to build resilience. By working together across different sectors, we can find new ways to prepare for and prevent the devastating impacts of future disasters.

Brock Long is a seasoned emergency management professional with over 25 years of experience. He previously served as the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), where he led the agency’s response to numerous high-profile disasters.

Tune in and hear insights on the 4 legs of a successful disaster response, the unpredictability of modern disasters, the need for disaster equity, and the importance of proactive mitigation. 

 

Highlights:

  • 00:25 25 Years in the Face of Worsening Disasters
  • 04:58 The 4 Legs of Success
  • 13:25 The Biggest Hit We Might Experience
  • 17:00 Disaster Equity- Is the Current Disaster Declaration Process Still Practical?
  • 22:42 Approaching Mitigation the Right Way 

 

Tweets:

Disasters are getting worse, and the old ways of responding just aren’t cutting it anymore. Tune in as Executive Chairman of @HagertyConsult and former FEMA Administrator Brock Long shares a bolder vision to transform disaster response. #Recover #Rebuild #Reimagine #podcast #wildfire #DisasterRecovery #AfterTheFire #2024WildfireLeadershipSummit #FEMA #ClimateDisasters #DisasterPreparedness #CommunityResilience #EmergencyManagement #FEMAReform #LocalLeadership #CrossSectorCollaboration #MitigationStrategies 

 

Quotes: 

04:20 “Passion is the right mix of love and anger. I love what I do. I’m angry about the framework that we have to operate in to get the job done.” —Brock Long 

05:46 “We need to stop looking at people in this country being victims all the time, but actually being the true first responder in every community, in every situation.” —Brock Long 

06:55 “Insurance is going to fix you far greater than FEMA assistance.” —Brock Long

10:58 “A bigger FEMA is not going to solve our problems. This is a team sport, starting with standing on being the first true responder in the room right now.” —Brock Long

15:54 “We’ve made it so difficult that most communities have no idea what they’re entitled to — how to streamline all this funding down to do the greatest good, to recover and become more resilient.” —Brock Long 

21:13 “We’re not even giving people tangible skills on how to be a good steward of the earth.  So instead of pointing a finger at each other, how do we come together at these events to start separating the politics and come together as human beings to figure out how we change the future.” —Brock Long

25:31 “We don’t have a national strategy to build the language that we need to change to make things easier in our world. We don’t have it because we’re not organized around it.” —Brock Long

 

Meet Brock Long, Executive Chairman, Hagerty Consulting & FEMA Administrator (2017-2019)

(c) Phil Dziedzic 847.345.8686

Brock Long is a seasoned emergency management expert with over 16 years of experience working with local, state, and federal governments. As Director of Alabama’s EMA, he oversaw responses to 14 disasters, including the H1N1 influenza and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. He has also served as a FEMA Regional Hurricane Planner, Response Team Leader, and statewide school safety coordinator. Currently, Brock is the Executive Vice President of Hagerty Consulting, where he leads the firm’s emergency management programs and has served as Project Executive on over 50 projects across the United States. His expertise and leadership have made him a sought-after speaker and commentator on emergency preparedness and response.

Connect with Hagerty Consulting:

 

Transcription:

Brock Long: First of all, to our friends from Hawaii, thank you so much for sharing those stories. I wish there was something I could say to put it all back together, but there’s just no way I could ever imagine what you’ve been through. Man, I’ve been doing this for 25 years, my whole career. I want to share something with you. I started in Georgia, Georgia Emergency Management Agency in school and university safety. We were hired because we had more deaths in schools in Georgia than anywhere else in the United States. This was all before Columbine. I was hired out of college to keep kids safe. And then last week, fast forward, one of the schools I worked with got shouted out. 

In 25 years, I’ve seen too many disasters. I’ve been across half the globe. The stories are all different. Each wildfire is unique. Each hurricane is unique. There’s just a long way to go. And why you think that you spent 25 years and things should be getting better with the things that you’ve been out and talking about doing, they seem to be getting worse. I never (inaudible) for the FEMA position. I often joke that every time I change jobs, something catastrophic would happen. Starting in school to university safety, and Columbine happened. 

I interviewed with FEMA Region 4 on the morning of 9/11. I was named hurricane program manager in 2004, and Florida got hit with four major hurricanes in six weeks. I left FEMA after Katrina. I saw FEMA as its best. I saw FEMA at its worst after Katrina. And we learned that we’re only as good as our last disaster and our weakest links. Went into consulting and then got a phone call to go be the director of Alabama’s Emergency Management Agency. I got the BPD Water Horizon oil rig explode, and I had more disasters in 2009 in the state of Alabama than any other state in the United States. I’ve worked with affluent communities. I’ve worked with very poor, disadvantaged communities all over the place. And then of course, I get a phone call to go serve my country as FEMA administrator. I’m not a politician. I was actually Senate confirmed 95 votes to four, only four negative votes. So I think that says a lot. I’m an emergency manager. I care about people. 

And when the phone call comes in and you’re given the keys to FEMA, I don’t even know how to counsel any of you if you ever get this job on where to begin. I often joke that my name is Brock Long. I’m a recovering female administrator. Here we are in Sonoma with wine. But the thing about it is that I had two months. Mother Nature gave me two months to begin figuring out where we are, where we needed to be, and how we were going to get there by coming into an agency of 21,000 people. And honestly, FEMA is a very small organization compared to the rest of the federal government. When you think about proposals, for example, adding 65,000 to the IRS, and FEMA has got 21,000 employees. Think about the magnitude of the job. FEMA covers half the globe, from Tinian and Saipan, all the way to the US Virgin Islands, 15 Island territories. It’s never a dull day. You’re working across incredible time zones. It was a day I actually had eight conference calls, all with governors starting in Tinian and Saipan, and working our way all the way to the US Virgin Islands. And every governor’s disaster was the worst. So you get in and your Senate is confirmed. Two months later, Mother Nature just burps. Here I come. 

I had 220 disasters. Wildfires declared disasters in two years, and no event every three days. It doesn’t begin to also address the numerous disasters that you have at the local and state level that are not declared. You are left to your devices working with NGOs and the community to restore. There’s hundreds of those as well that’s mixed in. The thing is, I always caveat this by saying that I’m very passionate about what I do. If you don’t understand the definition of passion, it’s the right mix of love and anger. I love what I do. I’m angry about the framework that we have to operate in to get the job done. And I wish that I could have dinner with somebody right now and pick their brain to be Jimmy Carter. I picked Jimmy Carter’s brain because FEMA was developed under his leadership. Was FEMA meant to be a disaster relief agency? What it’s evolved into today from community, long term recovery, housing, all kinds of things. We become the largest insurance agency in the country. And so where does it stop? 

The thing that I’ve learned from all these disasters is there’s definitely a significant model. There’s a model for success, and it’s very simple. I try to put it into easy terms to understand. So it’s almost like this chair. If the seat that you’re sitting in is your community, that’s Hawaii, that’s Lahaina, that’s Missouri, that’s California. Whatever it is, it is supported by four legs. Those four legs represent different things. This first leg, and the most important one, is a true culture of preparedness within our citizenry that does not exist in this country right now. Why can I graduate from some of the most elite universities in this country and still not know how to do CPR and invest $1 towards retirement? How can I do these things and not understand the importance of insurance? Those types of things. And also, how do we get back to the community emergency response team? Almost more of a civil defense type movement. 

We need to generate that and stop looking at necessarily the people in this country being victims all the time, but actually being the true first responder in every community, in every situation. If I fall over and have a heart attack, who’s the first to respond? Or whoever knows CPR? And then you’re the first true responder until the official responders can arrive. It escalates up from there all the way to the White House for presidential disaster declaration. But we’ve got too many generations that don’t understand financial resilience. And some of our programs that we have been touting for decades on preparedness to go buy supplies for five days is an unrealistic financial task. And probably 70% of households, not because of poverty, but also because of asset poverty, I don’t have cash for three months because of the lifestyle I have. Or because of other circumstances that may be impacting my household inflation, whatever it may be. But we’re still asking people to go buy food and supplies for five days. I’d rather take that money and be properly insured. 

Insurance is going to fix you far greater than FEMA assistance. But there’s a whole host of things, and I’m going to use flood examples. Some of our public awareness campaigns have been off for decades. So if you look at the flood programs, why do we tell people that they don’t need flood insurance if they’re not inside the FEMA flood zone mapping that we put forward. When the message should be any house can flood. Any house can flood. When you’ve had devastating wildfires, the floods can change. You guys know that runoff of these mountains, whatever it may be, can absolutely destroy a flood map. And yet we talk people out of insurance. And these are the things that we’ve been doing with our public awareness campaigns, quite frankly. Somewhat off, and need to be re-thought. We’ve got to figure out low to no cost ways of being to mitigate households going forward and be innovative. We can put people on the moon. We can figure this out. We can actually build communities correctly too if we can put people on the moon. 

This second leg is a strong state and local emergency management capability. You have to have strong emergency management capability at all levels, in addition to a culture of preparedness that is empowered. And that’s a neighbor helping a neighbor again too. That neighbor helping neighbors is way more powerful than the federal government response. But we don’t do that. We don’t even know our neighbors right now in some cases. But this second leg is a strong state and local government, right? I was fortunate enough that when Harvey, Irma, Maria and the California wildfires of 2017 popped off, there were strong state level and local level capabilities in California, in Texas and Florida, so that FEMA can concentrate where the relationships are not as good or the strength is somewhat off. But that’s incredibly important. 

That third leg is the private sector. The private sector owns 85% of the infrastructure that we depend on each and every day. But yet, we look at FEMA to fix everything. We look at FEMA to be the incident commander. I don’t own your power grids. I don’t own your farm to table supply chains. I don’t own a whole lot. And there’s been this philosophy that FEMA is an incident command system. We’re the incident commander. I disagree with that. We’re actually a coordinator of resources to help the private sector, or the local government or state government to overcome what it is that you’re seeing. And when I was in office, I was trying to put this in play by saying, listen, all disasters are locally executed, state managed and federally supported. But after Katrina and the post Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, we turned FEMA into this big national 911 system with all this capability at the federal level, and nothing at the local and state level that’s even close to comparing to what we’ve amassed at this federal level that may or may not come when your disaster strikes. That’s what we’ve done. 

That fourth leg is the firepower of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. That is my ability as FEMA Administrator to marshal the resources of the federal government down through your governor, ultimately to the incident command level in Lahaina or wherever it may be, When FEMA makes the news, and they never make good news. 220 disasters is a pretty defeating job. When you go to work every day, man, they actually did a pretty good job. You never hear that

When FEMA makes the news, unfortunately, it’s because at least one leg, if not multiple legs are missing from that chair. If you remove that one leg, whatever it may be, strong state, local government, maybe it’s a lack of culture preparedness. For whatever reasons, the chair is unstable. And that’s when we make the news, and that’s when Congress wants to reform the fee. We saw it in Katrina. We’ve seen it in Maria. We’ve seen it in all of these different events. So the point that comes across is, a bigger FEMA is not going to solve our problems fighting the future of wildfires, a changing climate, or whatever it may be. You’ve got to remember that this is a team sport. Starting with standing on being the first true responder in the room right now, and working all the way up from you, the individual, to the firepower of the federal government. 

The other thing that we started to look at was, holy cow, there’s not a one size fits all system that we’re ever going to figure it out. And I think we’ve arrived in an age now that’s really scary to me, because I don’t think you can figure out what’s going to go wrong tomorrow anymore. Just be pretty, pretty predictable in the 1980’s and the 90’s. And starting my career in the early 2000’s you could pretty much do a risk and vulnerability assessment and understand trends, whether they were climate variability trends or changing whatever it may be, different threats that came in. But with the introduction of the cybersecurity age and different things that we’re seeing now, a lot of what we roll through in emergency management, to me, is a fruitless exercise. Trying to guess what could go wrong tomorrow, and we’re never going to do it. 

I’ll give you an example. I was at LAX with the airport, working with the airport to go through training and exercise with their upper level leadership, and saying this very thing. And the next day, the CrowdStrike computer download debacle occurred, and airplanes couldn’t get off the ground across the globe in some cases. You’re not going to be able to guess it. But what can you guess? Shift our focus a minute. What’s got to be working in your community is that if it’s not working, people are dying or life routines are disrupted. What are those things? What’s got to be working? Utilities, okay. Break that down. Water. What else? Electricity, communication. You can’t do anything without safety and security. I don’t care what the arguments are. If you don’t have safety and security, you can’t have a viable school, church, community, you can’t respond. You definitely can’t recover. There are different tenants within your community, they have to be working. And then again, who owns that infrastructure, or who owns those invisible supply chains that your community depends on? Who owns that? Are they in your EOC? Are you working with them when you’re developing response plans and mitigation tactics to essentially sit down and say, if you go down or if you’re attacked, regardless of what it is, where do you need us? The biggest thing that’s going to hit us in the future, and mark my words, is that when we have a big attack. 

For example, on our energy system. I don’t have a good feeling that the Department of Energy and the 300 investor owned major energy companies even know how they’re going to do communications when it’s all shut down. But yet, in emergency management, what did we buy after 9/11? We bought cows, communications on wheels. They’re everywhere. They’re at your ball games. They’re at the county fairs. They look great. They’re all shiny. They’re pretty. I call them air conditioning units because we’ve never actually really roped them into Tactical Operations in our systems into major infrastructure that’s privately owned. And I’m gonna tell you, sometimes the actions we take may actually hurt. The response tactics that we take may actually be hurting, and keeping the power, the lights and the communications from coming back home. We’re going through these response plans because that’s the way we’ve done business for decades. 

I’ll give you an example after major disasters. There’s one state I was working with in 2017. They would go through their operations, and then they started with debris removal. They start shoving debris out of major roadway systems to open them up. They shove all that debris right in front of the infrastructure that the power company can no longer access their equipment, or the communications companies can’t access their towers because of the way we did debris removal. Because there’s been no communication or no pre planning on how we need to become more tactical as we think through things. The other thing is about mitigation. With mitigation, we were fortunate enough to learn when to attack. I don’t feel like emergency management has any idea how to lobby Congress and change the rules when the chair is broken and legs are missing. 

Everybody outside the emergency management community wants to reform FEMA, and we get blessed with things like the Sandy recovery improvement. And then you get faced when your communities are wiped out, you have to deal with things such as, well, Congress gave money from disaster recovery. It went to 20 different federal government agencies to fund over 91 different recovery programs. Your recovery plan is not even remotely indicative of what Lahaina is going through, or what Paradise went through, which is the worst disaster I’ve personally ever seen. Kristy, you went through Harvey? We’ve made it so difficult that most communities have no idea what they’re entitled to. How to streamline all this funding down to do the greatest, good, recover and become more resilient. 

And I can tell you, the other thing that bugs me is that because FEMA is such a small organization, again, I don’t think bigger FEMA is going to solve any of our problems. But you have to realize that when there’s disasters across half the globe every three days, I used to say that if they were a car engine after Hurricane Harvey, they’ve been redlining ever since. That car engine has been redlining ever since, and they have never been able to recover, get their feet underneath them, and they’re not going to be able to send YOU people into the field that are going to be able to clearly articulate how recovery works, and what the vision for that should be. And so based on the thing that we’ve got to go back and rethink some of the systems that we’ve been operating off of since 1979, we were formed on April Fool’s Day, 1979, right? April. But here’s the thing, why do we even have a disaster declaration process? Why do we even need it? Does the FBI need permission or disaster declaration to come to town for worker crime? 

So when it comes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and real reform, in my opinion, I believe that the disaster declaration process was a great foundation in 1979, 1980 that was established. But there’s no way that this process actually works for what we’re going to face tomorrow. It is not a path forward to community resilience. It is not going to lead us into this fight against climate change or whatever may come. Let me explain that. Does anybody really know how you get a disaster declaration? What are you looking for? Specifically take the trauma of the people away for a second damage assessment. Who said that? What kind of damage assessment? 

FEMA’s most expensive expenditure in disasters is uninsured public infrastructure. Why? One, why is it allowed to be uninsured if it’s insurable? And then two, why does your fate of a disaster declaration revolve largely, 95% of the time around insurance or the lack thereof? Literally, you go out and you start to look for uninsured public infrastructure, and the federal government attaches $1.54 to each one of your heads. So whatever the population of California is, it’s $1.54. Whatever that number comes out to be. 

What’s California’s threshold? 40 million? If you can find 40 million uninsured public infrastructure losses, then you’re most likely going to get a disaster declaration. That’s how our system works. It makes no sense. It’s actually a moral hazard the way that it puts forward. There is no incentive to the communities who are actually doing the right thing. You get the same disaster cost share, whether you’ve implemented state of the art building codes, done proper land use planning, you’ve thrown a lot of money towards mitigation as you would to another state that does none of that, who doesn’t have a code at all, who does no land use planning or whatsoever. So how do we rebuild an entire declaration system that actually rewards positive behaviors, rather than rewarding those who don’t do a whole lot? And that’s a tough question to have. But that’s where we are, in my opinion, when it comes to the disaster declaration process in this country. 

And the other thing is that the tools in your toolbox are never the same. If you are declared, why do we have to have an individual assistance declaration and a public assistance declaration when we talk about equity, disaster equity? Why is there a difference whether 30 people are impacted, or 30,000 are impacted? Why would you not turn on individual assistance if it’s truly needed and the state, the local governments cannot solve that problem. 

Let me put this into context. Chris Smith here needs a glass of wine. He’s a local emergency management director. You need one glass. But for whatever reason, the disaster you went through, you’re out of that glass of wine. All of your local county to county mutual aid partners, they’ve used their glass of wine. The State of California has thrown all of their hundreds of glasses of wine towards this event to help the local counties, and now they’re out. But the federal government is sitting on 15 billion glasses of wine, and they’re not going to give it to you because the disaster declaration process says that you didn’t have enough uninsured losses. So the thing about it is when it comes to the passion, when we come together to these things like this, what are we doing about it? How are we organizing all of these different parts from the private sector to the mayor of Lahaina, to the federal government? How are we actually coming together to solve climate change problems in the future, rather than pointing the finger and saying it’s FEMA’s fault? Insurance is at fault. So and so’s fault. Climate’s changing. We’re not even giving people tangible skills on how to be a good steward of the earth. 

In the preparedness programs, most people have no idea how they can individually fight climate change. So instead of pointing a finger at each other, how do we come together at these events to start separating the politics? Get the damn politics out of it, and come together as human beings, neighbor, helping neighbor to figure out how we change the future, and get Congress to listen rather than reacting when the chair is broken on the next disaster. Because all it’s doing right now is strapping new parts to a rusty old bicycle. That’s what we’re doing. It’s not a good message, but I hope it lights a fire under your rear end to come together and start collaborating. Talking about how we lobby, how we bring together instead of chastising insurance. How do we go to them? How do we go with all this money out there? $1.2 trillion is out there to be spent under infrastructure improvements and job acts, but only 130 billion of it has been spent to this point because people are tired. They may not know what they’re entitled to. They don’t have the staff to go after it and administer it. 

But what if there was some leadership somewhere, whether it’s FEMA or us, or whoever that starts to dictate a vision for what that money looks like to buy down risk in the future? What if we concentrated our mitigation dollars and the purpose of, I wanted to call it the Brock Fund, but that would have been pretty arrogant. But we got the BRIC. I’m a big believer that if you spend the money on the mitigation up front, proper land use planning, building codes work, those types of things, we won’t be having conferences like this if we do it right. 

The BRIC Funding was specifically designed to start a national strategy of how we start to approach mitigation. Because right now, all 50 states do their one off mitigation plans. You gotta start asking your question, what are we striving for as a country to make things safer? What are we striving for? There’s no way to measure all the 50 different plans from California to Tennessee, or whatever it may be. How we’re actually making a dent in buying down risk. What’s left over 1.2 trillion to buy down those risks, and who should we be talking to? How do we use that money to get insurance companies back to the table? What if we stopped looking at mitigation dollars as just solely brick and mortar? But what if communities who are depressed could get a mitigation grant to offset insurance costs, coupled with financial education and resilience, coupled with labor programs to understand how jobs can be brought into these communities. How do we do that? I don’t know. But I think it starts with, stop pointing the finger. 

When you’ve been the head of FEMA, or you’ve been an emergency manager for 25 years, it’s not FEMA’s fault. It’s not the Mayor’s fault. It’s not some local emergency manager’s fault. It’s hundreds of people’s faults or agency’s faults. Let’s come together. Let’s figure out a new bicycle frame, and let’s figure out how you start to empower and bring organizations and big sector infrastructure together to write meaningful legislation. And finally, let’s learn how to attack Congress. Right now, FEMA is all the word around. FEMA is the disaster relief fund running out of money. To me, that smells like opportunity. That’s the perfect time to have your language to reshape how we do emergency management. Simplify it, reduce the complexity, whatever it may be. Have that language ready to go to insert that supplement. So that when it’s a must pass supplemental because we’re running out of disaster funding, Congress has got to push it through, and that’s how the laws get changed. But yet, we want to go to Congress and have a hill day with some 25 year old staffer who smiles and shakes your hand and says, I’m going to tell the senator. Don’t you worry. And we missed it three times. 

I had to ask for more money in the disaster relief fund three times in two years. And each time we tried to insert the Disaster Recovery Reform Act in there, three times, and it got thrown out three times. I felt like I fumbled the ball, and then I found out that associations that had been an emergency management for a long time had no clue that the laws were even being considered. We don’t have a national strategy to build the language that we need to change to make things easier in our world. We don’t have it because we’re not organized around it. The only way we got the DRA passed was because we attacked the Federal Aviation budget bill. Because if it didn’t pass, Congress couldn’t fly home. And we got it attached there. And that’s literally how the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, the BRIC program, the 5% management cost where I was saying that I don’t have staff to send you. Use 5% of whatever you’re allotted to hire your own force account labor or consulting firms to come in and be a force multiplier to your army. That’s how that got passed. 

Thank you for letting me be here. I hope that this spawns conversation in real change, and we’re not just having another conversation about another bad disaster next year. That we actually start to measure what we’re talking about, and how we’re making that change? Thank you.

How to disaster logo

Recent episodes: