As planning coordinator for the Fort Bend County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, Caroline Egan leads her team in preparing for, mitigating against and responding to all types of disasters in Fort Bend County.
As recovery manager for Fort Bend Recovers, a long term recovery group with United Way, she works alongside nonprofits and other organizations to help disaster victims rebuild their lives.
Egan has been involved in the emergency management field since 2007. She began her career with the American Red Cross before moving to the Fort Bend County Office of Emergency Management, which is now called the Fort Bend County Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
Egan discussed her office’s involvement in emergency preparation and response and outlined some of her efforts to help the community move forward after a disaster.
The term “emergency management” gets used a lot these days. Can you tell us a little bit about your office and what your job entails?
Emergency management is a process under elected leadership where communities manage complex emergencies and disasters. Essentially, our role in emergency management is to try to improve the outcome of a disaster, and this can be measured in trying to save lives, in reducing injuries or damages, decreasing disruptions, or having shorter recovery time from any type of disaster.
And it's not just natural disasters that we get involved in.We get involved in other types of disasters. COVID-19 is a public health disaster. If there were any terrorism type incidents, or wildfires or a chemical explosion- those are all cases in points of where we would get involved.
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What does emergency management do to prepare for a disaster?
We kind of have four phases of disaster. Before disaster, we really focus on the preparedness planning side of things for mitigation. We work with our government partners, our nonprofit partners, our community-based partners, our hospitals and our school districts to respond to any type of disasters. That way, we have those relationships formed, we know who to reach out to, and we know what resources are available for any potential response or recovery.
It’s also making sure that we're doing outreach and education to our public, or going out into the community, or in the case of COVID-19, doing more virtual presentations. We’re talking to our residents, to our students and to our neighbors about how they can be prepared for disaster.
Do you have a plan? Are you informed? Do you know what you're going to do if you had to evacuate? Or if, for example, like in COVID, your business has shut down- do you have a continuity plan in place? We do a lot of trainings and exercises during this preparedness phase.
Then we exercise those plans. We test them out. We actually do a mock scenario, and we work through that and try to work out the kinks ahead of time.
What do you do during a disaster?
For example, with Tropical Storm Beta that just moved through- we do what we call “situational awareness.” We need to know what is going on. And it's not just within Fort Bend County, but in our region or with our jurisdiction.
We make sure we prioritize our response operations. We work on things like alerts and warnings and keeping the public informed.
How does your office get involved in recovery?
Recovery is pretty much anything that happens starting immediately after the disaster, and it can extend into days, months, or even years after disasters.
With Tropical Storm Beta, we did get rain, and we did get some wind. We had flooding, we had trees down, but we managed to clear that up. So the recovery period with Beta was really kind of short, and it's not really that involved.
But if you think back to our flooding in 2015 or 2016, or even Hurricane Harvey, those recoveries can take a long time. We're more than three years past Harvey, and I'm still being contacted by residents who need help with their recovery.
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We also work with our partners to make sure we get information out to our public through community meetings or town halls or through outreach.
We’ll say, “FEMA is here, and they're offering FEMA assistance or federal assistance- this is how you apply.” Or, “Here is a nonprofit that has programs available.”
How did Fort Bend Recovers come about?
Fort Bend Recovers was founded in 2016. The Tax Day floods happened in 2016, and we had a number of homes that were impacted from that. They needed help recovering, whether just mucking and gutting their homes, repairing their homes or knowing how to better improve drainage in their neighborhoods.
As we were responding and recovering from the disasters, we formed Fort Bend Recovers. United Way and Fort Bend County Homeland Security and Emergency Management co-facilitate Fort Bend Recovers. It’s our official long term recovery group.
It's comprised of a group of local nonprofit and local government agencies. They’re not just the county departments, but also jurisdictions like cities.
We’ve got a lot of nonprofit organizations, faith-based organizations, houses of worship, churches, mosques and synagogues that are involved. There are also some business partners in the community. We’re a collaborative network.
What are some of the ways Fort Bend Recovers helps the community rebuild from a disaster?
We have a few main work groups. Disaster case management is essentially our entry point for residents into the recovery process to get any type of assistance. From there we can figure out what needs they have and what are the best resources to help meet those needs.
For example, if we find out someone has insurance, and their insurance is going to cover all of their damages,we can help them work through that insurance process through the claims. But if we find that their insurance isn't going to cover everything or they didn't have insurance, then what we do is disaster case management where our case managers will look to what organizations have capacity or funding to help after disaster and match a particular resident or client up with that organization.
Donations management is another group. A lot of times immediately after a disaster, you get a lot of people who want to donate cleaning supplies or do financial donations right away. But we're finding out that we also have donation needs months and even years down the road. While the disaster is on the public's mind, the donations management team tries to solicit as many donations as possible to have later on.
Also, if we get a lot of donations, we generally need to set up a donation warehouse. We find a place to store all of our donations, and we manage them from there.
Then we have a disaster behavioral health and spiritual health work group. To me, they're one of the more important of our work groups. We’re seeing that there are a lot of mental health and spiritual health issues after a disaster. Unfortunately, there's a lot of stigma attached to that, and we are trying to encourage our residents to reach out for the help that they need. And it's not just our residents, but our responders and people who are helping in a disaster as well.
This particular work group does a lot. They help try to set up trainings or seminars to help people or even have one-on-one sessions with people. They make sure people get the help they need after a disaster or crisis.
claire.goodman@chron.com
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