AHC Emergency Management Consulting

I saw this on Google+ and wanted to share it. I do not know Frantz but I'm thankful for his sharing it.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone. - Steve  LIVING THROUGH SANDY by Frantz Ostmann on Saturday,  November 17, 2012 at 7:13am  1. The excitement and coolness wears off around day 3 2. You are never really prepared to go weeks without power, heat, water etc. Never! 3. Yes it can happen to you. 4. Just because your generator runs like a top, does not mean its producing electricity. 5. If you do not have water stored up you are in trouble. a. A couple of cases of bottled water is “NOT” water storage 6. Should have as much fuel as water a. Propane b. Gas c. Kerosene d. Firewood e. Firestarter, (kindling, paper, etc) 7. Even the smallest little thing that you get from the store should be stocked up.. (spark plug for the generator, BBQ lighter, etc) 8. If you are not working, chances are nobody else is either. 9. I was surprised how quickly normal social behavior ...

It has been a busy year.  Too busy to spend much time blogging....  obviously... .   However, we have been busy micro blogging.  In other words, we are pumping stuff out on Twitter and Facebook .  Twitter provides an easy way to send more information through a more effective and manageable medium.  For instance  with the use of hashtags  (such as #Hurricane, #HSEM or #UASI), we can tag stories as being relevant to the topic at hand.   As a result of this shift to Twitter, we are sending fewer posts to our mail lists and doing much less blogging.  But, if you are interested, we have a daily paper that takes our Twitter posts and those of others in the Emergency Management field, and aggregates them in a paper format.  The Emergency Management Daily  is generated automatically and provides an easy way to browse the posts of the day.  You can subscribe to the paper and receive a daily ...

PRESS RELEASE COLUMBIA, MD – August 6, 2012 -  All Hands Consulting  (AHC), a leading provider of  emergency management consulting  services, has completed several projects recently as part of a busy 2012.  The balance of 2012 has many exciting projects on the books. Despite the sluggish economy, the business of preparing for emergencies goes on. So far, 2012 has been an exciting year of steady work for AHC. All Hands consultants kept busy working with many returning clients and a few new clients. Our  client list  has grown to over 150 while our team of consultants has climbed well past the 1,100 mark. We successfully built several large teams of very qualified consultants to staff national exercise and planning programs as well as response teams who are standing by to respond to catastrophic disasters. This includes a  cadre of disaster responders  for support to  FEMA ’s  Individual Assistance Technical Assistance pr...

The Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA) is a new process that, according to FEMA,   allows a jurisdiction to understand its threats and hazards and how the impacts may vary according to various community factors. The idea behind a THIRA is that this knowledge will help a jurisdiction establish informed and defensible capability targets.  Unlike the previous Target Capabilities List (TCL) which prescribed national levels of preparedness, the THIRA process uses the new Core Capabilities and a process which lets a local jurisdiction or state "right size" the capabilities to a level which they feel is prudent to prepare for. In other words, how bad of a disaster do you want to prepare for, and how prepared do you need to be? FEMA released its Comprehensive Preparedness Guide 201 (CGP 201) in April 2012; the guide, and related technical assistance, describe how to conduct a THIRA.  The THIRA must be submitted b...

Both the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations marked up legislation recently that rejected the National Preparedness Grant Program (NPGP).  See National League of Cities article below.   Senator Mary Landrieu summed it up in saying that “… major stakeholders wrote to us asking us not to include these reforms.” The Senate is to do mark-up on Tuesday.  The Senate draft only funds "the big four grant programs" and is $1.4 Billion so less than the House version.  Other grant programs, such as MMRS are not included but would be eligible and would need to apply to states to get funded. The Senate's proposed funding levels are less than the House version. These will be reconciled in Conference Committee at a later date. The Senate bill provides $1.41 billion for state and local grant programs, $369 million above the comparable fiscal year 2012 level. The bill does not include grant reform as proposed in the President’s budget...

After months of waiting, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has released the much anticipated guidance for conducting "Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessments (THIRAs). The THIRA process provides a common way to more fully understand all of the risks communities face and is now required for homeland security and emergency management grantee states and Urban Areas under the UASI program. The process ties the risk of a threat or hazard to capabilities to look at gaps as part of a comprehensive preparedness cycle. (See links below.) FEMA's Deputy Administrator Tim Manning authored the following blog to help announce the new guidance which is formally known as Comprehensive Preparedness Guide 201. Here is Tim's Blog on THIRA: At FEMA, we’ve been working hard to ensure that our nation continually strengthens its resiliency and becomes as prepared as it can be against all hazards. Today we took another step forward in that ...

After what they described as more than six months of meetings, conference calls, and over 20 drafts, the  National Emergency Management Association ( NEMA ) issued a report that documents their examination of the suite of homeland security and emergency management grants which include the Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG) Program and the Homeland Security Grants Program (HSGP). The report, a “ Proposal for a Comprehensive Preparedness Grants Structure ” follows last summer’s NEMA report titled “ The Homeland Security Grant Program – Keeping a Promise to the Nation .” According to the NEMA web site , this effort was spurred by a desire to provide an alternative to calls to Congress to “please don’t cut funding”.  The calls to not cut funding fell on deaf ears as Congress proceeded to cut the budget sharply. Homeland security grants were targeted for a disproportionate level of cuts, down nearly two thirds from FY 2010.NEMA and the International Association of E...

We know that the economy is bad: Budgets are being reduced, grants are being cut, and competition is fierce. We assume that many in the All Hands Community may be looking for work and we want to help. All Hands Consulting tries to help place as many people as possible but we have g rown to over 1,000 consultants and there is no way of keeping everyone busy. We often get requests to either help fill jobs or to share information about job openings. We often do this on our various lists but we do not want to load up general mail lists with job announcements. For that reason, we focus on sharing job openings on a mail list designed for just this purpose: The Emergency Management Employment Yahoo! Group at  EmergencyManagementJobs . If you are looking for a job, I would encourage you to join this list as that is where I will be posting job openings. Another great resource for job seekers is the IAEM Job Board - you should check the board often. Steve Detwiler keeps up a st...