When I met with Daniel Stevens in the City of Vancouver’s emergency management office, I felt like I had my feet back on terra firma.  He spoke in local government terms that we all know and love in the UK, so it seemed easier to make like for like comparisons about how we and they […]

In the Bay Area in San Francisco, they have a very interesting model for regional work.  Since 2006 12 Bay Area counties and three cities (Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose) have worked together to form the Bay Area UASI (Urban Area Security Initiative). The organisation is funded through FEMA grants in order to provide multi-jurisdictional […]

The buzz word (or buzz words really) for FEMA and the US government, since the arrival of Craig Fugate into the post of FEMA Administrator, after Hurricane Katrina, has been Whole Community.   The whole community approach is all about ‘bringing diverse people into the discussion, into the planning and into the action; taking advantage […]

Fully staffed, the San Francisco Police Department have around 22,000 officers and civilian staff serving around 800,000 people.  According to the infallible Wikipedia ‘as of October 2011, the Met employed 48,661 full-time personnel. This included 31,478 sworn police officers, 13,350 non-police staff, and 3,831 non-sworn police community support officers’.  The Bay Area which could be […]

Whilst I was in San Francisco, I was lucky enough to catch up with Warren Edwards and the CARRI team who were in town doing some research with one of the universities, into how generic resilience guidance that they had produced for the Department of Homeland Security, could be tweaked to be made university specific. […]

The office where Daniel Homsey and Kristin Barrera work is difficult to find to say the least.  This is partly because it is tucked away in almost the rafters of San Francisco’s City Hall.  The building reminds me of Camden Town Hall on steroids! It is massive, and somehow Daniel and his small but perfectly […]

The role of the Office or Department of Emergency Management will take in any city will really vary in each community that they represent.  The San Francisco Department of Emergency Management perform their role for San Francisco, which is both a City and a County, but it really only covers the very specific central area […]