Show Up

"Better three hours too soon than three minutes too late."

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Representatives from response organizations arrive at the scene to set up an interagency coordination center following a disaster in Colorado. Photo by Michael Rieger/FEMA.

I saw the message waiting on my phone and knew what it meant: Vacation over. Deployment on. Hurricane Katrina was waiting on line one.

I had spotted the story on sidewalk stands a few days earlier. The front page of every newspaper announced that Tropical Storm Katrina had crossed the southern tip of Florida and entered the warm Gulf waters. Favorable conditions for hurricane development, reports said. I'd felt my disaster antenna twitch at this news. Maybe it was New Orleans' turn.

It shouldn't be that bad, I told myself. I wasn't in the current rotation. I wouldn't get a call unless it was all-hands-on-deck, and what were the odds of that?

The phone message was from Cindy Ramsey, one of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's top officials. "I don't know where the hell you are, but you need to call me. FEMA director Mike Brown has canceled your leave. The levees are breaking. All hell's breaking loose. And the governor won't come out of her mansion."

It was all-hands-on-deck. I crisscrossed the room, stuffing clothes in my bag as I called Cindy back.

"It's bad," she said when we connected. "I need you to start in Houston. We'll bring you to Louisiana later. Harris County Judge Robert Eckels is opening the Houston Reliant Center for the Katrina evacuees. Go there. Meet him. Hard to track you down. No one knew where you were."

"I know," I said. "Sorry. I'll go to Houston. But you need to know—"

"Is Andrea with you?" she interrupted, referring to Andrea Booher, a well-known documentary photographer who worked on assignment for FEMA.

"She is."

"Tell her Houston, too, for now."

"Okay, but I need to tell you something."

"Later," she said, "I've got to go. We can talk when you get to Houston."

"That's what I need to tell you. It might take a few days."

"What? Why? Wait, where are you?"

"Spain," I said. "... Hello? Cindy? Are you still there?"

"Get moving," she finally said. "Get back here as fast as you can. You know what to do. Show up in Houston."

Within minutes, Andrea and I had our bags packed. We jumped in our rental car, and I drove to Madrid Airport as she worked the phone with Continental Airlines to arrange flights.

"We'll get you there," the Continental customer service representative said. "But hurry. Your first flight departs soon."

On the highway outside of Madrid, federal police pulled us over for a vehicle search at a drug and alcohol checkpoint. I was sure my frantic look and sweat-drenched brow contributed to them motioning us to the side. No way to catch our flight now, I thought.

"Huracán. Los Estados Unidos," quick-thinking Andrea explained, flashing her FEMA badge. They waved us through. The disaster must have been a monster. It seemed the whole world already knew about it.

We ran through airports and sat fidgeting through fifteen hours of plane flights with nothing to do but wait. It was every emergency manager's worst frustration: not being where they're needed.

Thirty-six hours after I talked to Cindy, we stood in the parking lot at the Houston Reliant Center. Plenty of challenges lay ahead—for me, the agency I worked for, and most of all, the communities hit by Hurricane Katrina.

But we had crossed at least one hurdle. We showed up.

All aspiring emergency managers need to learn the principle of showing up, which means arriving on the disaster scene ready to help. This principle should be self-evident. The only way to learn how to manage emergencies is by throwing yourself into them.

What's more, showing up defines you as a crisis leader. It becomes part of your legacy. Any discussion about you, your career, and what you might have accomplished begins with stories about the disasters you worked on and the things you did in person.

Emergency managers do a lot besides responding to disasters. They develop exercises and plans, conduct training, manage funds, handle critical administrative requirements, and build new Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs). All of these tasks are essential to ensuring a robust crisis response. Yet policy leaders, legislators, influential outsiders, and the public will judge you only by how they perceived you handled the last disaster.

You can be a great planner, and no one will know. You can have excellent employee morale-boosting events, and no one will care. You can implement a worthwhile and impactful preparedness campaign, and everyone will forget. When people talk about FEMA, they speak about Katrina, Maria, COVID-19, or 9/11. They don't talk about the new carpet in the operations center.

This chapter will define what we mean by showing up and why it's essential to make it one of your core emergency management principles.

FEMA gives certificates for each disaster employee's work. The top two federal and state leaders running the operation sign them. These certificates mean a lot to the people who get them. Some employees tape theirs to their office walls. I saved every one of mine. They are necessary because of what they represent:

• You were physically on the scene. You left your office and deployed to the disaster. You walked the rubble and saw the impact firsthand.

• You engaged with people outside your organization. For me, showing up meant talking with more people outside of my organization than inside it.

• You contributed to the response. Your position or title is not essential. What mattered was that you had a disaster assignment. Showing up can mean something different depending on whom you ask. Yet, for everyone, there is one final test: When things got ugly, did I answer the call?

Of course, that will never happen. Yet, in my experience, there were never enough people who did, and this problem has the potential to get worse. According to FEMA's Daily Operations Briefing, within the agency, daily cadre availability for immediate deployment in the first three months of 2022 often hovered below 25 percent, partly because many staff were already assigned elsewhere.

Across the industry, more than 70 percent of emergency management specialists are older than forty, according to Zippia career demographics in 2022. The field needs a pipeline of new professionals ready to replace those retiring in the coming decades. The necessity for crisis leaders is also growing as disasters become broader in scope due to population growth in high-risk areas, emerging infectious diseases, the rise of violent extremism and terrorism, and impacts associated with climate change.

Not every emergency manager in the nation needs to be on the scene for a three-county flood in rural Ohio. Yet everyone who works in emergency management needs to show up some of the time and be ready all the time.

New emergency managers will often try to emulate the office all-star. The one who projects in-the-office confidence, walks the right way, and knows how to act around superiors. Yet when disaster strikes, this is often the person who disappears, at least in my experience.

When I first started with FEMA, division bosses encouraged my incoming management trainee class to admire a fast-rising young program manager. After watching him for a few weeks, I could see why. He displayed a good game. I remember how he would tilt his head and lean into the conversation when talking with agency leaders. He had perfected the purposeful walk.

But there's a reason we refer to the "Showing Up" principle and not the "Showing Off" principle.

We quickly discovered he was an Eddie Haskell, the iconic duplicitous character from the 1960s television sitcom, Leave It to Beaver. He couldn't have been more condescending to new employees away from supervisors. The most extended conversation I ever had with him was when he told me, "Goddamn it, watch where you're walking" when, klutz that I am, I almost spilled coffee on his new, bright white tennis shoes.

In a quarter-century of disaster work, I saw him twice in the field. Once during Hurricane Andrew, he popped into the Miami office for a few days. The second time I saw him at an after-action meeting following a Midwest flood event. He was an office all-star, a leadership pet, and a crisis no-show. You'll meet a few of those in your career. As you may have already discovered, when the bell rings not everyone shows up, despite the expectation that disaster duty is a job requirement. We'll examine different reasons for this in more depth later in the chapter.

Make sure you're looking to someone worthy of your admiration, not the Eddie Haskell of the office that leadership told you to look toward. Mentors are great when you start, but pick someone you've seen in action—and still admire—in an actual crisis.

Look for responders who have weathered the criticism that comes with this type of career without losing their enthusiasm for the job. Are they quick to scramble out of the office before the hurricanes hit? When you talk with them, are they eager to explain their passion for what they do? If you want to learn how to make "showing up" one of your principles, you want to pick someone like that.

You are just as likely to receive criticism and unsolicited analysis as you are unadulterated praise. There will always be sideline observers, ivory-tower critics, and generic blowhards happy to tell you what you should have done. Yet you will never see them on the scene getting their hands dirty. If you take nothing else away from this chapter, focus on the mission, your job, and the people you serve—because that's what those who embrace the "Showing Up" principle do.

If you're reading this, I'm confident you entered this line of work for the right reasons. You want to help people and make a difference for your community, state, and country. I can hear you say, "I want to work on disasters. That's why I got a job in emergency management." You didn't pick up this book to learn how not to be a crisis leader. You may also see these stories as an opportunity for professional growth.

You want to be the type of crisis leader people can count on. That means you need to make showing up—the right way—one of your core principles. Develop the habit early and continue to practice it throughout your career.

When I worked on disasters, and things got crazy, I'd often hear crisis leadership say, "Call John or Jane. That's who we need, and they'll show up." You want to be the John or Jane they mean.

Showing up is more than dropping into the Emergency Operations Center and saying, "Here I am." That counts, to a degree, but there's more to this principle. You must:

1. Recognize your opportunity and responsibilities.
2. Deal with your fears.
3. Decide what type of emergency manager you want to be.
4. Be prepared.

Chris Luhring was a twenty-nine-year-old police chief and rookie emergency manager in Parkersburg, Iowa, when an EF5 tornado struck on May 25, 2008. It was the first EF5 recorded in Iowa in more than thirty years. "It was like an atomic bomb got dropped on our city," he said.

"Sure, it was my job to respond, but it was more than that," Chris recalls. "I grew up in Parkersburg. I knew everyone. I saw the city grow and prosper. I was new to my job and not the most confident guy. But the first thing I told myself was, 'This was the day you were born for.'"

Like Chris, you might be brand new to your position when a historic disaster gets dropped in your lap. There will be no warm-up. Ready or not, you have to show up.

More likely for newcomers, months or years will go by where your only action will be training, exercises, and more training. You may even feel embarrassed telling people you work in emergency management but have never managed an emergency.

In my case, I experienced the combination of both extensive training and not having managed an emergency yet. As I mentioned in the introduction, not long after starting with FEMA in 1989, I deployed to Puerto Rico for Hurricane Hugo. Then it was three years before I worked on another disaster when, in 1992, the agency sent me to south Florida for Hurricane Andrew.

Though both were major disasters that needed engagement from throughout the federal government, I wasn't anywhere near the first wave out the door. I had to beg for a chance to go. Yet those deployments were how I found my calling. They made me realize I wanted to be on the scene when disasters occurred.

Between those assignments, I continuously asked for deployments and was left out. Meanwhile, colleagues decades older than me with hundreds of disasters under their belts were running disaster operations in different areas of the country—several supported disasters on remote islands in the Western Pacific and the Marshall Islands. To a thirty-one-year-old aspiring emergency manager, it sounded unbelievably cool.

I saw the pride they felt working with state, territorial, and local officials, helping people overcome difficulties, and rebuilding damaged infrastructure. I wanted to be like them: a part of disaster history. Though I had a job in the profession, I still felt like an observer, watching others handle the catastrophes. I believed I had the right tools and mentality. I just needed the chance to prove it.

In 1993, I received a transfer from the grant and training side of FEMA to the disaster response side. No longer a replacement player, I was now on the first team out the door. Even better, my new boss was John Swanson.

Within the emergency management world, John Swanson was a legend. For decades, he had been the go-to guy in FEMA, the one you called when the big ones hit. After years of struggling for more opportunities, I'd now be getting them on John's team. I had it made.

Yet while I had physically moved into that role, it took time to make the mental adjustment. Inside, I was still the guy who had to beg for a deployment. Even in a disaster responder position, I still thought I needed an invitation when disaster hit.

Not long after joining John's team, floods slammed the Midwest. They started in May, and by July, nine states and five hundred counties from Minnesota to Missouri had been declared disaster areas by President Bill Clinton. It was later named The Great Midwest Floods of 1993. This historical event marked a transformational moment in my career, though I was slow to see it coming.

One afternoon, I was on vacation in California, splashing in the pool with my kids, when John called.

"How's your vacation going?" he asked. He still made me nervous. Preoccupied with what to say next, I missed the sarcasm.

"Umm. Okay. How are you doing?"

"We're on the move. South Dakota's getting it now." Then John stopped talking.

He was not the kind of boss to explain himself. It was starting to hit me by this point, though I had not completed the mental one-eighty.

"Flooding pretty bad, huh?" I asked.

"That's right."

"Do you want me to go?"

"Well, that's kind of why we hired you."

"I'll be there tomorrow."

And there it was. I was no longer the last guy left in the office. Now I was being requested. It took four years, but the door had opened.

It's a pretty significant shift when you come off the bench. First, you're waiting for your chance. Then, when your time finally comes, you can't believe it.

If you're wondering when yours will happen, my guess is sooner rather than later. As I previously mentioned, disasters are getting worse and more frequent, while the impacts of climate change loom ever more significantly. Yet timing is not your only concern. There's also an emotional aspect to showing up.

It's normal to feel nervous when something important is at stake. As soon as I had the opportunity—I had been working toward it for so long—my mind played a cruel trick. It said that if I showed up, I wouldn't meet the expectations of my colleagues.

It took a decade of responding to different disasters before I felt fully confident showing up to the scene. Veteran crisis specialists will tell you this is normal.

It takes time to experience a gamut of incidents. And it takes time in the field to understand the cycle of mitigation/preparedness/response/recovery phases, to see the scope of challenges communities face during their recovery years, and to grasp the intent of all the programs. At least it did for me.

For many, the fear of underperforming never goes away. That's because few careers carry as much pressure and expectation as emergency management. That fear is not an entirely negative emotion, either. It keeps you on your toes, for sure. However, you can't allow the fear of underperforming to prevent you from showing up.

I watched many career emergency managers avoid deployments over the years. To me, it was apparent that something scared them about working in the field. From what I have seen, when disaster professionals can't overcome their fears, it often plays out in one of two ways:

1. They invent excuses not to show up.
2. They try to talk the boss out of allowing them an opportunity to show up.

I have seen high-ranking government officials find an excuse not to answer every time the phone rang for them. Yet these are people whose job description says: help communities after a disaster.

Why the disconnect? I suspect some were worried about being exposed as less capable than their position, title, or reputation suggested. Perhaps they felt expectations for the response were too high, or their involvement would result in failure. There are legitimate reasons why someone would not be available for deployment. However, being afraid to do the job isn't one of them.

In the movie Remember the Titans (2000), the star quarterback gets hurt, and the coach calls for the second-string quarterback, who says that he's not ready and can't make all the plays.

"Yes, you can," the coach tells Ronnie. "Your team needs you tonight. You're the Colonel, and you're going to command your troops!"

Many people worry about being overlooked or underestimated in their work. Yet when an opportunity comes, they talk themselves out of accepting it. Having selected hundreds of people for disaster assignments, I often reassured talented people that they could do their jobs. And in every case, they exceeded my expectations.

I also can't recall a single instance where a crisis leader I admired threw an employee into a situation to fail. They offered assignments that turned out to be exciting and challenging. When a respected disaster pro gives you a job that's more than you think you can handle, take it. That usually means they've realized your potential before you have. Something about disaster works draws out the best in people, which means you are capable of much more than you think.

It can be scary stepping into a disaster knowing that someone's well being—or livelihood—may depend on you. Yet if you find reasons not to show up early in your career, it will only get harder to start later. Remember that feeling unprepared is normal. You must learn to manage your hesitancy when disaster strikes.

It helps to realize what it means to get the call. While others are evacuating the disaster area, you get called in. During a pivotal moment for your organization, community, tribe, state, or country, you were essential enough to be asked to help. You also won't be showing up alone. Committed and compassionate professionals will surround you with one common goal: to help the people and communities impacted.

In addition, you may get lucky.

In 2002, Guam was hit by two typhoons. Typhoon Chataan struck in July. The second, Super Typhoon Pongsona, clobbered the island territory in December. According to the NOAA-funded Pacific Regional Sciences and Assessment Program, one severe tropical storm threatens Guam every year.

At Guam Memorial Hospital following Pongsona, doctors delivered babies and performed surgeries with flashlights because the facility had no power.

A few months later, Governor Felix Camacho embarked on an international trip to tout the island's recovery and encourage tourists to return to beachfront hotels. However, Guam Memorial Hospital CEO Dr. David L.G. Shimizu had a different message about visiting Guam.

"Come to Guam, and you may get lucky," he told us. When asked what he meant by that, he said, "It's only when you are faced with a disaster that you begin to learn what you are made of. You may think you know, but it's only by going through one that you will truly know."

Showing up defines the type of responder you will be, sometimes for your entire career. Emergency managers plan, prepare, and train for disasters, but not everyone wants to be at the scene when the bell rings.

Are there roles in emergency management that don't require you to show up on the scene every time? Of course. There also are many opportunities to be a vital part of the disaster team but in a secondary role. You might get assigned to a regional coordination center.

Yet, on some occasions, you need to show up. You need to be on the scene. It's the only way to round out your knowledge and skill set. To fully grasp the impact of your agency's policies, programs, and public communications, you need firsthand experience delivering them when people need them most. What's more, the emergency management community will define you by how you handle deployment moments when they arise. When family, friends, and colleagues reflect on your emergency management career, guess what they'll remember most? All the disasters you worked.

When you work in emergency management, there are four ways to handle a deployment request and a disaster assignment opportunity:

1. Don't show up.
2. Pretend to show up (also called disaster tourists).
3. Show up unprepared.
4. Show up to make a difference.