UNO Magazine: When Disaster Strikes Farm Country

The following story appeared in the most recent issue of the UNO Magazine. Read the full magazine online as a Flipbook.

A decade ago, UNO's College of Public Affairs and Community Service (CPACS) launched the state's first bachelor's degree program dedicated to emergency management and disaster science.

Developed as a program that can be completed on campus, online, or through a mix of both approaches, Emergency Management and Disaster Science has become one of CPACS' fastest-growing degree offerings in large part due to its accessibility and flexibility, including a variety of minors and certificate programs that can fit the need of any student looking to support communities in times of crisis.

As an Emergency Management major at UNO, Amanda Fox’s classroom lessons introduced her to the processes of preparing for a devastating emergency and how to formulate a recovery plan that can be put into action when a disaster strikes. But on the job as an emergency management specialist in rural Wisconsin, she quickly learned the realities of the unique threats to life and property that exist in farm country and the scarcity of critical resources that are often needed in an emergency.

Of the many resource shortages today’s rural emergency planners and first responders must contend with, perhaps the most critical is the lack of the up-to-date communication tools that can transmit regular and timely updates before, during and after a natural disaster or manmade emergency.

Residents of the cities and suburbs have become accustomed to receiving audible alerts and text messages on their mobile phones when dangerous weather or an emergency threatens. But that isn’t an option for many residents of farms and small towns where high-speed internet access and cell phone service is often spotty at best.

“Trying to reach people and get messages out was very difficult,” Fox said. “We had the warning sirens. We had TV and news and we had the radio and all those other things. But we also had this plan where the police cars were going to mount megaphones. They each had their own specific route, and they were going to drive the route and just shout at people.”

Her emergency management team even recruited a pilot who could fly a plane equipped with loudspeakers that would broadcast emergency messages in three languages as it flew over an area, Fox said.

During one large flood that left several residents trapped in their homes, she said her team had to improvise to rescue people from the rising waters. Without access to trained water-rescue team, she had to make a call to a heavy equipment operator who was able to pluck people from their homes in the bucket of his front-end loader.

Floods are a universal emergency that both rural and urban emergency managers must be prepared for. However, Fox said she also had to have plans ready to implement for some incidents that were truly unique to a region that included a nuclear power plant and many large dairy farms.

Waste from the dairy cows was often loaded into special trucks that were used to spray it onto cropland as a natural fertilizer. If those trucks were involved in accidents, it would cause their noxious contents to spill out into drainage ditches that ran into Lake Michigan, the area’s primary source of drinking water.

“We had poop-filled ditches all the time,” Fox said. “So, we had this highly trained hazardous materials response team that was trained for nuclear disasters, and they were in there slopping poop out of the ditches.”

The term “emergency management” may conjure up images of first responders rushing headlong into danger. But Fox said the reality of being an emergency manager is much different.

“I think some people get into it because they think they want to be boots on the ground,” she said. “They think it’s going to be response. They think they’re going to be out there in the middle of the fun and the guts, and the glory and all that other stuff, and it’s so not that. You’re more like a stagehand. My theory is that if I am in the field, it is a bad day.”

A typical day for someone in that “stagehand” role is often filled with developing plans, conducting training and tabletop exercises, community outreach and writing grant proposals. While those activities may not make for exciting headlines, Fox said they are her favorite part of the job.

“I love to plan, and I like arranging things,” she said. “So, it’s really fun for me to be presented with a problem and have all of these resources that don’t necessarily fit. How can I make this work? And that’s fun. Problem solving is really cool.”

Fox, who started college as an accounting major, credits her education at UNO for helping hone her skills and her passion for planning. John Bartle, dean of the College of Public Affairs and Community Service, said much of the coursework in the Emergency Management program is heavily focused on preparing graduates for planning, risk mitigation and resource management.

Students enrolled in the program can customize their degree by choosing two specialized concentrations from a list of 15 possibilities. Some of those areas include aviation administration; information technology and communication; natural disasters; planning and preparing for urban hazards; and public health.

UNO also offers a unique concentration that gives participants an opportunity to earn an undergraduate certificate in Tribal Management and Emergency Services. Courses are offered oncampus and online, making it more readily available to people across the country.

“[Tribal lands] of course tend to be very intensely rural areas,” Bartle said. “As you know, a lot of the land that many native tribes were given at the end, or were pushed onto I guess is more accurate, was the worst land. It was off river bottoms and so forth. So, these areas are more prone to disasters, flooding in particular. So, each tribe is supposed to have an emergency manager.”

With more than 450 tribes represented in North America, this concentration presents an opportunity for the UNO program to expand its impact and reach across the country.

Nebraska has 93 counties, most of which are primarily rural. Because these counties are required to have emergency management services, students at UNO have many opportunities to gain real-world experience.

“What we’re trying to do is provide a pipeline of students and graduates who are ready to be professionals in any of those contexts,” Bartle said.

When a flood, tornado, fire or chemical spill strikes a rural area it’s common to have local, state, federal and nonprofit agencies all working together to help victims recover. UNO’s program prepares its students to coordinate communications and efforts to ensure these groups can work efficiently to mitigate damage and to help people recover.

“If they’re not cooperating, it’s not good; things aren’t going to work,” Fox said. “But if the people who are working there are graduates, and they have the understanding about how to make effective and durable, cooperation among organizations, then it might be better.”

Nicholas Walsh, a 2014 graduate of the UNO program, currently serves as the Emergency Preparedness Manager for Methodist Health System in Omaha. Prior to joining Methodist, he held positions with the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency and a small county health department, where he worked on emergency planning and preparedness efforts.

Walsh, who also earned a master’s degree in public administration from UNO in 2020, credits the school for providing a strong foundation of skills needed to succeed in the field, including public speaking, collaboration and critical thinking. Additionally, he said the program engaged the regional network of emergency managers across various sectors to instruct courses, which provided him and the other students exposure to real-world experience that helped prepare him for the unique challenges emergency managers face today.

“In Emergency Management, we are always preparing for a disaster that may or may not occur,” Walsh said. “Most people will directly feel the impact of a tornado, flood or hurricane within their lifetime.” Walsh said research shows memories of disasters fade relatively fast as life moves on. Consequently, encouraging people to plan and prepare for such events can be difficult and, at times, discouraging. The result is often under-funded programs lacking the resources and capabilities to engage in large-scale preparedness and mitigation actions. It’s also common, due to these restraints, to see an emergency manager balancing other duties such as firefighting, law enforcement and even weed control, Walsh said.

While some of the responsibilities of a rural emergency manager may seem mundane at times, when a disaster such as the Missouri River flood of 2011 and the 2019 “bomb cyclone” that flooded a vast swath of the state occurs, the job can instantly become exciting and challenging. During both those natural disasters, Walsh said he was able to put his knowledge and experience to the test as he worked around the clock to help save lives and protect resources.

While he has taken his skills in a new direction in recent years with his move from rural emergency management to health care, he said he continues to find the rewards of his career to be plentiful.

“Working in the healthcare field, the greatest reward is when, after collaboratively developing plans and response activities, our frontline personnel are able to maintain an excellent level of care for our patients,” Walsh said. “It is also extremely rewarding to see the end of a long project such as a safe room for a school, knowing that you have done your part to try and mitigate the risk to future generations.”