Local leaders attend FEMA training course
About 150 local leaders, representing local governments and emergency services and supporting agencies and organizations, attended an Integrated Emergency Management Course led by instructors from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Emergency Management Institute.
This course is highly sought after by emergency management agencies across the country. Emergency Management Institute only selects 10 organizations annually to participate in the course. After a rigorous, two-year application process, the Joint Emergency Management System and the associated member communities were selected for a June 2019 delivery.
The course provided participants an opportunity to simulate a regional response to a disaster. Members of the community, from fire, police, public works, public information officers, municipal managers and other department officials, worked together in classes developed by Emergency Management Institute specifically for our region of the Northwest suburbs.
The participants worked through tabletop exercises discussing their potential operational coordination during a prolonged emergency or disaster. The week culminated with a large, functional exercise where each municipality opened their emergency operations center and coordinated a response to a disaster in real time, leveraging the simulation between each of the 10 centers being fully activated simultaneously.
Emergency Management Institute developed a simulated disaster with assistance from the local National Weather Service office, pulling from historic storms to develop a real to life scenario.
Joint Emergency Management Coordinator Mick Fleming noted in his closing remarks to the group that this week was the "culmination of three years of cooperative training and exercises," and that this opportunity will "continue to provide our emergency preparedness programs opportunities to grow collectively."
The course was sponsored by the Northwest Central Joint Emergency Management Agency, a cooperative effort by 10 communities to provide for shared, regional Emergency Management services.
The 10 communities that participate in the Joint Emergency Management System program are Arlington Heights, Buffalo Grove, Elk Grove Village, Hoffman Estates, Inverness, Mount Prospect, Palatine, Rolling Meadows, Schaumburg and Streamwood.
Through the system, participating communities utilize the program staff to drive industry standards and best practices into regional planning, training and exercises. From an all-hazards approach, Joint Emergency Management System staff collaborate with municipal leadership to build communitywide emergency management capabilities in all phases of emergency management.
For more information about the program, visit www.nwcds.org/jems.