The Future of Emergency Management

Analysis on a particular reddit post from r/EmergencyManagement was requested. The post is as follows:

“I’m curious how emergency management consultants have been impacted by everything that’s happened since January 2025. I’m not only talking about the massive hits to FEMA and the federal funding cuts and disruptions, although those are huge. I’m also talking about things like AI being increasingly more widely adopted and how that impacts what clients are willing to pay for services. How is you/your firm doing?

I can say that in my tiny corner, it’s been seismic. LinkedIn posts increasingly feel like headstones in the graveyard of an entire profession. But I don’t know if that applies to everyone. Would be interested in hearing from others.”

There are a few broad realities that complicate this question, they are:

1. A broad fundamental misunderstanding of the scope Emergency Management is supposed to operate within.

2. High variance in the emergency management labour market due to the nature of the work.

3. Complications with credibility and oversaturation due to ‘snake-oil’ salesmen.

4. Much of the work is low-skill and fairly easy to automate.

Before going point by point, a quick overview of the specific things Emergency Management (EM) specialists do that other professions do not do:

A. Hazard Identification Risk Assessments (HIRA). While other industries like health and safety will do things that are close, only EM or other Disaster Risk specialists really do HIRAs.

B. Holistic risk perspectives. The EM specialist is supposed to look for and attempt to anticipate secondary consequences from events. 

Take Covid-19 as an example. Public Health doctors will give highly specific advice to leadership that is restricted to the medical hazard. When questioned as to secondary effects, they will virtually always say something to the effect of “I can only give my best medical advice on the matter”, they will generally ‘stay in their lane’.

Emergency Managers do not have a lane. They are the one specialist that is supposed to be anticipating the entire transit network. When leadership gets feedback from a particular specialist the EM specialist is supposed to temper that by informing leadership of the secondary consequences of following highly specific advice.

Going back to the Covid-19 example, this might include getting information on educational, economic, and other risks based on whatever is suggested by the Public Health doctor.

C. Abnormal Operations Specialist - Not panicking. The EM professional is often one of (or the only) person in the command structure that is explicitly paid to not panic. Every job title from Emergency Management Coordinator to Director of Emergency Management, to Special Advisor to the President is usually this.

Where everyone else may be specialized for normal operations and is taken aback by the situation, the EM professional is specialized in abnormal operations. They are the proverbial ‘calm within the storm’.

D. Professional Jargon Translator. Within a leadership environment, usually in an Emergency Operations Center (EOC), there will usually be multiple leaders of various organizations or their representatives.

These people are usually very dominant personalities and will be used to operating within a particular professional cultural silo. It is very possibly the case that the paramedic chief, the police chief, the city lawyer, and the power company will be used to so much jargon that when attempting to talk to each other in a crisis, they might as well be speaking different languages entirely.

The EM professional is supposed to be the one person in the room that is multi-disciplinary enough that when this occurs, they can translate between these people if needed to keep things as productive as possible.

Further, the EM professional has hopefully built good-faith relationships with all these people so that any personality issues can be pre-emptively mitigated or otherwise resolved.

Broadly speaking, that is it. Virtually everything else EM professionals do is a core competency in a different service as well and is something that can be delegated. 

• The 9-1-1 dispatch center facilities people can set up an EOC. 

• Police civilian staff in general can handle virtually all telecommunications and incident command infrastructure logistics.

• Insurance specialists can do damage assessments.

• Hazard specific specialists (not EM people) are doing the majority of the information gathering for the risk assessments. Doctors are informing on medical risk, hydrologists are doing the flood risk, etc.

• Unpaid volunteers can fill, lift, and move sandbags.

• Being the ‘liability magnet’ or ‘scapegoat’.

• 
  

If the EM specialist is primarily helping to operate the emergency shelter on the front-line and is handing out food, their position is probably redundant.

Going point by point:

The Scope of Emergency Management (EM)

At its most fundamental level, EM is a leadership function. What this means is that it is something that exists within the skillset of leadership or exists to augment a leader’s ability to operate.

Much of emergency management is incorrectly positioned within organizations or is given a task that is outside of its realistic scope.

An example of this would be housing the ‘city’ emergency manager within the fire department or the public health unit instead of within the mayor’s office. When an emergency manager is buried within an organization that is not at the scope level that they are supposed to operate at it creates many issues, two in particular become significant:

1. They increasingly risk being biased toward the organization they are housed within. A public health emergency manager will be predisposed to take healthcare hazards more seriously than non-healthcare hazards simply due to organizational exposure.

2. They are too far from the decision maker in the organizational hierarchy. Consider the city emergency manager being housed within the fire department. In order to communicate with the mayor their communications may need to go:

Emergency Manager 🡪 Fire Command Supervisor 🡪 Fire Chief/Commissioner 🡪 City Manager 🡪 Mayor

Many jurisdictions will multirole their emergency manager by making their fire chief or commissioner act as both the head of the fire department and also the director of emergency management. This effectively eliminates emergency management as its own independent position and risks heavily biasing towards the individual hazard specialization of the individual who has been given ‘two hats to wear’.

This sort of organizational structuring effectively either:

A. Eliminates the emergency management specialist from the organizational structure entirely.

B. Puts them so far down the hierarchy that they are not reasonably able to fulfill their leadership-support function. This makes the majority of their expertise irrelevant.

High Variance in the Emergency Management (EM) labour market

EM jobs increase and decrease based on the frequency and severity of disasters. They are heavily tied to a variety of phenomena associated with humanity’s unwillingness to adequately prepare for infrequent events.

Right after the hurricane when a bunch a people die there is a sudden influx of emergency management positions “we better not let that happen again”.

The further into the future one goes; the more people forget and the more jobs are cut until the population is inevitably significantly underprepared. This disaster triggers increased vulnerability, another massive strikes, job demand increases after the long-term decline, the cycle continues.

This cycle is likely to continue indefinitely until either:

A. EM or Disaster Risk specialists figure out a solution to the preparedness-paradox and the other associated human behaviours that make the population resistant to the field.

B. Automation gets to a point where the population is sufficiently satisfied with ‘good enough’ performance and the field is designated as effectively obsolete.

Snake Oil

Based on anecdotal evidence and experience it is estimated that easily half the industry is a scam. This is especially true in the planning phases of EM and Disaster Risk (prevention, mitigation, and preparedness).

It is effectively industry standard in large parts of these industries to:

1. Bring in a large number of expensive consultants with clipboards.

2. Give organizations a survey to fill out. 

3. Run the results through a program that spits out a template plan.

4. Submit the plan to the organization so they can meet a checklist requirement for some certification.

5. Put the likely 500-page plan that no one has read on a shelf to collect dust.

As an additional note, some of these plans are so poorly written or obviously copied from things that don’t make sense, it brings into question if the author (consultant) even proofread it before submitting the deliverable.

There are an incredible number of individuals that have come from other sectors like banking, police, and fire services that treat emergency management as their retirement career. A glaringly large number of these individuals do not choose to really learn the emergency management skillset. 

Many do what they normally did in their previous job, call it emergency management, or business continuity, or disaster risk reduction and sell it to a client. Due to how specialized the skillset is and how few people actually understand it, the client usually doesn’t know the difference.

In addition to the incredible risk that is assumed due to a false sense of security, this sort of behaviour also massively oversaturates the market creating two problems for individual that wish to get into EM:

1. The field itself suffers credibility issues that any given EM professional may be negatively impacted by.

2. It creates significant inflation within the job market with seemingly qualified individuals that are functionally incompetent.

Low Skill Work that is Easy to Automate

This relates heavily to the explanation of what work EM professional do above.

Work that EM professionals do fall into roughly 3 categories:

1. Things you need an EM professional for.

2. Things that you can get a different specialist to do.

3. Things that can be automated.

The things you need an EM professional for are listed above. That list is fairly exhaustive, you don’t really need an EM professional exclusively for anything else.

Consider the situation where budgetary cuts become necessary, for whatever reason. If one has to choose between two people:

A. The person who can set up an emergency operations center (EOC) that also is the facilities person for the 9-1-1 dispatch center.

B. The EM professional whose primary function is to setup the EOC.

Most people will cut the EM professional because their primary function is a redundancy. It is viewed as more effective to just expand the job description or person A rather than to pay for a 2^nd salary.

When viewing the industry through this lens, there is a massive amount of bloat in many EM departments, usually among the individuals below the director level.

It is no secret among EM specialists that with most incidents only one person is needed in the EOC. This means that many jurisdictions will generally justify 4-6 people total on staff in this capacity. 

2-3 people for an 8-hour or 12-hour shift, and their alternates in case someone gets sick, dies, or goes on vacation.

To show the issue with automation, here is a specific example with the HIRA.

A HIRA is supposed to have a custom likelihood and consequence section. These columns might be renamed other things, but they will serve a similar function regardless.

What many supposed EM professionals will do is take likelihood and consequence values from an outside source and copy them for the organization.

This is an incredibly bad idea and is potentially dangerous, but is none-the-less a commonplace practice. Putting aside all the ethical, professional, and practical issues with this, here is the reality with automation:

The only reason you need an EM professional is for custom likelihood and consequence values. If these are not custom then you could automate the entire HIRA with a phone app.

Not an AI-assisted phone app, a phone app used for fitness 10 years ago would be more sophisticated than what would be required to automate this. One could automate this on a single page of Microsoft Excel.

For another example, many EM consultants have a job where they are effectively a walking voice box that says “but what if that doesn’t work?” on repeat. It may be the case that they are forced into this role due to the conditions of their organization, but the fact remains that this is effectively their job description.

This person can be replaced by a sticky-note placed on the work breakroom fridge.

With all that in mind, yes President Trump cutting a significant portion of FEMA has flooded the labour market with EM professionals. Also, yes AI and other advancements will make a significant portion of EM specialists obsolete.

But the reality is that these things were going to happen anyways, and the really important parts of EM that one needs the specialist for are not feasibly going to be replaced by AI.

Conversely, a huge portion of the parts that will be replaced by AI you can already replace by purchasing Continuity 101: A hybrid continuity and disaster risk reduction approach.

We are confident that for $100CDN you can easily outperform half of the professionals in this industry that are posing as experts. 

If you don’t have $100CDN, then you can watch the YouTube playlist on our channel @PreparedCanada, in the courses section you can find the approximately 9-hour long playlist that covers everything broken down into an approachable format that laypeople can understand.

That playlist is free; free is where this industry is going.

Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp. and is the author of Continuity 101. He can be reached at info@prepared.ca.