Emergency Management, a.k.a. Controlling Chaos

Eric Hayden, Interim C.T.O, Technology and Innovation Department, City of Tampa Florida

Eric Hayden, Interim C.T.O, Technology and Innovation Department, City of Tampa Florida

I recall nearly two decades ago, Emergency Management was a new business term in government that was gaining traction. Everyone wanted an “Emergency Manager,” and there were many varieties of these specialists.

Origins in local government officially were set by Presidential Policy Directive/PPD-8 written March 30, 2011, which established we implement formal preparedness programs. Earlier in 2004, the Department of Homeland Security first published the National Incident Management System (NIMS), which laid a framework for organizing command and control for handling incidents that can disrupt businesses and government operations. We built our program and educated staff in phases over time.

During the early years, none of our first variations came with a budget. 

Hi, I am Eric Hayden, Interim C.T.O with the City of Tampa municipal Government.   My former title for seventeen years was IT Infrastructure Services Manager. My role was to run the organization’s data centers, technical support, networking, disaster recovery, and all field services for IT. I have very special teams, and I am so proud of their contributions to the city.

I myself have held many positions within our IT department over my 38 years with the organization. If you ask most of my friends, my superpower is making something to fit a situation out of what is available around us. 

Emergency Management on a budget means teaching the concept of Emergency Preparedness and NIMS/ICS framework to all accountable leaders across each department in the city and then exercising in borrowed spaces. Prior to Directive-8, operational managers such as myself did our own version of preparedness, disaster recovery and planning individually. When we appointed our first Emergency Manager, he was authorized by the mayor to produce a citywide plan for Emergency Management and begin the education awareness of all that it entailed. My IT teams built the first Emergency Operations Center using our Police and Fire dispatch center training room. Why here? Being in Florida and with no budget, our first requirement was to at least choose a place in a facility hardened to withstand a Cat 5 hurricane and have its own internal data center plus generator backups, kitchen, meeting, and sleeping areas. If this had been dedicated to Emergency Management, that would have been outstanding at the time, but 99 percent of the time, this center is dedicated to round-the-clock 911 dispatching, and all rooms were basically in use. It was a tight fit, and strangers were rarely welcome.

"In my experience, the best defense against unplanned chaos is controlling and practicing chaos via exercises."

As each year passed, I witnessed an evolution in mindsets and adoption among our leaders, and as our program began to gain ground in credibility, city leaders took it seriously, and soon, it wasn’t difficult to branch out to a larger dedicated site. I was fortunate to have a private business partner relationship with a financial institution that shared a common fear of uncontrolled chaos if the city were to be harmed by an act of terrorism or weather. They partnered with us at no cost to put us in a large available space they had in their hardened headquarters where all we had to do was provide the furniture, networks and computer systems and Fire and Police presence during actual emergencies. I was able to convince the administration the partner agency’s promise was real, and starting at that moment; the city had an actual dedicated Emergency Operations Center. With the Center, the then-mayor appointed the Fire Chief as the City’s Emergency Manager.

I was the IT member on the Emergency Management committee who assisted in leading the teams in building the centers year after year through a Super Bowl, special events, countless drills, and hurricanes.

In my experience, the best defense against unplanned chaos is controlling and practicing chaos via exercises. We had to reduce the dynamics and randomness of situations. We modernized our leases and enlarged our space to handle 19 Emergency Support Functions or ESFs. Our building maintenance division installed permanent furniture, and we dedicated 75 computers and telephone sets along with extensive radio, audio, and video equipment for coordinating and training preparedness. It was expensive and wasted so much time constructing and tearing down equipment for each event. One prior season in 2004, we had three hurricanes all across central Florida within a six-week time frame.   For our sanity alone, even if I had to write the check myself, we needed a place we could dedicate to the function of Emergency Management so we didn’t have to construct and deconstruct our equipment every hurricane season and special event. Today, our facility is state of the art; utilizing grants and squeezing money from tight budgets annually, we added technology, telephone and radio, and audio and video systems. Our mayor and PIO’s office produce dozens of national network news broadcasts onsite during actual activations. I trust many have seen us on CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, and other national networks.  

If you look for us in many of these broadcasts, you can see my team or the back of my head in the background, manning our ESF and doing our part. Our organization has a tremendous emergency management team, and departments are well-trained and motivated and can be activated at a moment’s notice. The logistics and dynamics have been reduced to simply showing up with our 72-hour go-kits and turning on the lights. This is the way it should be when we have so many counting on us to be there for them during emergency events. Beginning with full leadership adoption, having a dedicated space for emergency command and control was the key to our program.

Disaster Recovery

Financial

IT Infrastructure

Data Center

Logistics