Andrea Macdonald, founder of ideaXme interviews Craig Fugate, former Administrator at FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), USA, (2009-2017), reporting to President Barack Obama.
Craig, now Chief Emergency Officer of One Concern, provides his perspective on the recent crisis in Texas – the power grid outage, the current Mexican border refugee challenge (9,500 unaccompanied children at the border in February 2021) and his perspective on working together across nations to build international planetary-wide resilience.
Towards the end of the interview he even provides some tips on how we can as individuals all get through these tough and pressured times to build resilience. Scroll down to the transcript or click the arrow above to listen to the audio version of this interview.
Craig Fugate’s Biography
Mr Fugate served as President Barack Obama’s FEMA Administrator from May 2009 to January 2017. Previously, he served as Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Emergency Management Director from 2001-2009. Fugate led FEMA through multiple record-breaking disaster years and oversaw the Federal Government’s response to major events such as the Joplin and Moore Tornadoes, Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Matthew, and the 2016 Louisiana flooding. Prior to his tenure at FEMA, Fugate was widely praised for his management, under Governor Jeb Bush, of the devastating effects of the 2004 and 2005 Florida hurricane seasons (Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne, Dennis, Katrina, and Wilma). During his tenure, Fugate focused not only on restoring FEMA’s response capabilities but on promoting emergency management as a community and shared responsibility. Fugate instituted a permanent effort to build the nation’s capacity to stabilize a catastrophic event within 72 hours. He drove completion of Presidential policy on national preparedness and implemented the National Preparedness System to build unity of effort to address the nation’s most significant risks. On Fugate’s watch, FEMA awarded more than $19 billion in preparedness grants, supported more than 700 drills and exercises in 47 states, and had more than 40 million participants take part in grassroots community preparedness drills. During Fugate’s tenure, rates of adoption for disaster resilient building codes nationwide increased from 40% in 2009 to 63% in 2016. Fugate also provided Federal Government-wide leadership on reducing disaster risk through efforts to develop for President Obama’s approval executive orders that reduce the Nation’s flood, earthquake, and wildfire risk through managed Federal investment in hazard-prone areas.
FEMA’s use of technology to support operations and enable decision-making flourished under Fugate’s leadership. Prior to his service in the Obama Administration, Fugate served as Florida’s Emergency Management Director. As the State Coordinating Officer for 11 Presidentially-declared disasters, he managed more than $4 billion in Federal disaster assistance. In 2004, Fugate managed the largest Federal disaster response in Florida history as four major hurricanes – Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne – impacted the state in quick succession. In 2005, Florida was again impacted by major disasters when three more hurricanes – Dennis, Katrina, and Wilma – made landfall in the state. The impact from Katrina was felt more strongly in the Gulf coast states to the west but Florida launched the largest mutual aid response in its history in support of those states. Under Fugate’s stewardship, Florida’s emergency management program became the first statewide program in the Nation to receive full accreditation from the Emergency Management Accreditation Program. In 2016, he was the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA) Lacy E. Suiter Award honoree for lifetime achievements and contributions in the field of emergency management. In 2017, Fugate formed Craig Fugate Consulting LL. and joined One Concern as Chief Emergency Management Officer.
Transcript of Craig Fugate’s ideaXme interview
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: Today’s show launches the new playlist covering resilience. We’ll be looking at individual, state-wide, nationwide and planet-wide resilience. I’m here with the former head of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the USA, who has been described as “one of the top crisis managers”. In your words, who are you?
FEMA Administrator 2009-2017
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:00:51] I’m just Craig Fugate. I started out as a volunteer firefighter and worked my way up the ranks and found myself being asked to serve as the FEMA administrator in the Obama administration. So for most of my career, I’ve been around crisis, emergencies and disasters, everything from car accidents and hurricanes to floods and wildfires.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:01:19] During your tenure under President Barack Obama, 2009 to 2017, you were witness to over 500 presidentially declared disasters. How did you muster the personal resilience to deal with that?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:01:41] People think that each one of those disasters we personally engage in. The majority of the response in the US is actually done by state and local government. And a lot of what that involvement in those disasters were was a financial grant reimbursement process to help states pay for the cost of responding and the cost of rebuilding for uninsured losses. So there were storms, obviously, like Superstorm Sandy, the Joplin tornadoes, things where we were heavily engaged and responding to the disaster. But of those 500 plus, I would say 90 percent of them were after the disaster was really about the financial programs that FEMA ministers to help states recover financially from the impacts.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:02:30] Could you talk us through how this all works together with the running of government? There is the Stafford Act – Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance, a 1988 United States federal law designed to bring an orderly and systematic means of federal natural disaster assistance for state and local governments in carrying out their responsibilities to aid citizens. FEMA was set up by Jimmy Carter in nineteen seventy nine. How does it all work together?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:02:52] Well, the idea in the US is what we call federal government is how we’re constitutionally created and what makes us a little different. There’s only a few other governments that consider themselves federal versus national governments is under our Constitution. A lot of what authorities you would need in responding to a disaster are delegated to the states and their constitutions. So the federal government in the United States is not in charge, per say. They are in support of the states and over the history of increasing disasters and the complexity and the financial impacts. Congress decided to standardize financial assistance that had been scattered across a lot of different programs. As you pointed out, President Carter, under his authority to reorganize government, created FEMA out of different agencies to bring this together at the request of the governors. Who said: In disasters we’re dealing with so many different federal agencies. Could we just have one agency that coordinated on behalf of the federal government? And the Stafford Act was a program created to provide funding to states when they had disasters that exceeded our capabilities. And it’s primarily focused on the uninsured losses, the extraordinary cost of response, and has assistance for survivors that have uninsured losses. But these are not just going to be given. In any event, it has to be an event that exceeds the state capabilities, and it’s usually based upon the size of the state. So smaller states may get declared at lower levels than larger states. That was assumed to have more resources and capability. So it is not said that every state gets the same assistance at the same level. It’s based on need and capabilities of that state and exceeding their capabilities to manage that disaster.
Texas Power Grid Outage And The Mexican Border Refugee Crisis
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:04:57] Two crises that have received international media coverage recently, the power outage in Texas due to unforeseen weather circumstances and also the refugee crisis on the Mexican border. It was reported that nine and a half thousand unaccompanied children turned up at the border in February this year. Can you talk to me a little bit about both of those crises and how you would have handled them had you been on the ground there?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:05:34] Well, again, FEMA is a support agency, and in a case where the states have the lead, they would support the governor. So in Texas, where we had the extreme cold temperatures and compounded by the power outages. The governor had asked the President for assistance to help with that response, both from the standpoint of things like generators, but more importantly, financial assistance. And so FEMA was in support of the state and the state led that response. FEMA primarily has been helping financially some supplies, mainly financially. The situation on the border with the unaccompanied children is actually a federal responsibility. It’s not a state responsibility. And FEMA in this case has been tasked by the Secretary of Homeland Security, which FEMA is part of, to support the lead federal agencies, which is Customs and Border Protection, and for the housing of these children, Health and Human Services, which operates homes and group sites for children that have come in illegally and are processed in cared for until the court determines their status or they are literally paroled to family members or guardians. And the problem that has occurred is that children were coming in faster than health and human services facilities could expand. Part of that was due to Covid and restrictions on in congregate care how many people you could have in those settings. And so FEMA’s been asked to support the federal government to increase the amount of beds available so that as children are coming in, they can be processed, put into safe, secure locations. Their needs be met while the process of whether or not they’re going to be paroled to family members or held in the group homes until the courts determine their status.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:07:38] And we talk about the coronavirus now and managing the vaccine rollout. You were on CBS News expressing how you would have handled it. Could you talk to us a little bit about that?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:07:58] Well, I think what’s interesting about Covid, and we’ve seen this in other pandemics, is we address it with a public health model and we build our response around the public health response mechanisms that are in place. And we have seen in these events, not only in the US but globally that it fails in many cases. I think we need to understand that in certain types of disease outbreaks, particularly when we’re talking about a pandemic, the public health model may not be enough. It really takes almost a national response, in this case, a global response, because there were so many issues that Covid exposed, more things than the public health community could deal with. Like it’s easy to make the determination everybody needs to stay home. But how do you feed people? How do people get paid? If people can’t pay rent, they are going to be evicted. And so I think the thing we need to think through is, yes, we need public health leading all of the health aspects, but we need the rest of the team to be looking at some of the challenges we faced, supply chain disruptions, global dependencies on very narrow supply chains that became single points of failure. Global competition, as we’re seeing playing out right now with the availability of vaccines. And so I think, that was to me, the thing we need to take a step back and look at instead of just bringing together the public health to lead this response, we need to bring the rest of the team.
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:09:39] I think that’s where in the US emergency management programs, the federal government and FEMA is not to take over and run their response, but to really support the public health entities and focus all of the other consequences that are not their core expertise or their area that they have resources and do that. So an example as we saw more vaccine becoming available states were going to have finite capacity on how many shots that can give and so that the incoming administration asked FEMA to look at how they could set up increasing vaccine sites to increase the number of people to be vaccinated. If FEMA did that, working with the federal agencies, Department of Defense, Health, Human Services and others, so that in addition to what the states were already doing, they could set up even larger sites with the vaccine and give more people vaccines. And that seems to have sped up vaccinations. And the states that have these teams in many states, we’re now seeing the eligibility opening up as more and more people have been vaccinated. And it was, again, an example of how. FEMA was supporting the Health and Human Services, but wasn’t taking over the response. They were charged with building these sites and giving them up and running. The vaccine would be provided by HHS, but FEMA would help support that for the state’s.
One Concern’s International Crisis And Emergency Management Focus
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:11:13] You are now working in more of an international context. You have consultancy, Fugate, consultancy or consultants. You are also the Chief Emergency Management Officer for One Concern. Could you talk to us a little bit about the organization and its international focus within your area of expertise?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:11:42] And One Concern is a company that I joined early in their start-up phase because they were they were trying to answer a question that I’ve been very intrigued by, and that is: Why does it take a disaster to find out how vulnerable we are? An example, the power outages in Texas. We knew that cold temperatures would affect the grid. There were reports on that. There had been recommendations to harden those systems in Texas, but it never reached the point where it was done. And I think part of the reason nobody could really show them what a worst case scenario was, there was no simulation tool. And as we’ve looked at starting out with seismic risk, but now flooding and increasingly as climate change is accelerating extreme weather events, look what’s happening in Australia. This is the norm, these extreme events that we have no historical record of. And we have built so much infrastructure and so many people now live in areas that have vulnerabilities that historically is not telling us how bad things could be. And so it was the ability to model and simulate how bad could rainfall events be? What floods when you get three feet of water versus what the maps that you have that are based on older projections or past history or showing? Because I truly believe that as we’re as we’re able to harness more and more processing, computer power, artificial intelligence, we should have better tools to demonstrate vulnerabilities, especially when we’re looking at forward facing risk, things that have not occurred or are changing faster than our infrastructures and systems were designed for. And so that that was really attractive to me at One Concern that we’re looking at. How do you, not just forecast impacts, but actually get down to street level impacts and see how vulnerabilities, interdependencies could devastate communities.
Machine Learning Aids Emergency Management
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:13:54] One Concern uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and a digital twin of the earth that they’re building one. Can you can you talk to us a little bit about the technology they use. Could you give us a top line description of what it does?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:14:23] Well, artificial intelligence gets used a lot, and I think probably the term that I would use for what we’re doing is a lot of what we call machine learning, and that is taking very, very, very large data sets and running multiple scenarios of different types of events within those data sets and doing what I would more commonly call pattern recognition and seeing what the trends are in that data. This isn’t so much going to forecast that at a certain point so many inches of water is going to hit. What it can show us is what parts of the community are most sensitive to extreme rainfall events and roughly how much rain it takes for that to occur. But that’s just the first piece. The second piece is: What are the interdependencies? An example, it may be interesting to see that a hospital could flood. And that we could see that it would flood at a certain amount of rain, but what we may not see are the community it serves, the roads are cut off and people cannot get to the hospital. So we may find that the hospital can survive a flood, but the people it serves can’t get to it because roads and bridges are washed away. And that’s, I think, where we’re really trying to look at this from the standpoint of impacts the people. A lot of things look at impacts to infrastructure, look at buildings, look at roads. What we’re trying to do is take another look at the people that live there. And looking at social vulnerabilities and really translating resilience, I think is a lot of people are talking about resilience to things like how resilient are people and the systems that we design. Are the vulnerabilities being addressed from the standpoint of people? Or, are we just focusing on the buildings?
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:16:17] What sort of clients have you got at One Concern, are they government? Are they commercial or a mixture of the two?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:16:24] It’s a mixture. And again, a lot of our work is still in exploring the commercial viability. But the questions we’re asking are resonating in government, insurance, reinsurance and large corporations with global networks. Organisations have really started looking at their workforce. Too often we found that companies would plant for their buildings or their supply chain, but they’re starting to recognize that if their employees are impacted or can’t get to work or are having to stay home, as we saw Covid. It affects their ability to conduct business. So, it’s that idea that you can really bring in so much data before was almost unthinkable to look at and start looking for these connections and identify vulnerabilities before they come. Because what happened in Texas what the reports and the tragedy that occurred is not really surprising to me. The challenge was we had no good way of showing policy and decision makers what that would look like and really how cold did it have to get before this became the disaster. Because I think this is the other thing is some parts of the country are very sensitive to extreme weather events. Others have normalized that. But when it exceeds that normalization, it will break the system. And we don’t always know what that tipping point is. And history isn’t really prepared us for that.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:18:13] Can you talk to us about your work in Japan, you have offices in Japan as well?
[00:18:19] We are working with Sompo Insurance, who is one of the larger insurance providers to local governments. In Japan, there’s not a democracy where the federal government or the national government are going to pay for damages. Usually the local governments use insurance as their primary tool to manage their risk. And so Sompo was looking and asking a similar question that we were asking: How do we build resilience in communities to reduce, in their case both the impacts of disaster but also the cost of disasters? Are there things that government can do differently that one would be to reduce the cost to the insurer, but also the cost of the insurance and reducing operating cost? And so it was that question of looking at Japan. Seismic activity has always been a well-known risk, but flooding has been increasing in Japan like we’ve seen in other parts of the globe. And it’s one of the I think probably the clearest signals of that climate change is already occurred is extreme rainfall events that we are in many cases just not prepared for based upon where and how we have built our communities.Greater Co-operation For International Crises
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:19:42] A lot of the massive disasters have global impacts and are in addressing the core reasons, the part of the United Nations sustainable development goals. Do you ever mull over what you would do to maybe bring together greater international cooperation to address crises, disasters that have global impact? For example, you mentioned climate change, air pollution, the health of the world’s oceans, plastics pollution, PFA’s. What would you do? Do you actually believe in greater global cooperation in addressing the effects of these issues?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:20:48] Yeah, in the US, I think we have a tendency to look inwards. There are people that definitely look outward. The government has recognized that international disaster response isn’t just a humanitarian response. I think that’s the first thing I learned in talking to my counterparts in New Zealand, Australia, the European Union, Korea, Japan, a variety of countries that I’ve worked with when I was at FEMA and when I had left. And that is up until most recently, we usually have based our national disaster posturing as an aid program, providing foreign assistance and aid to what we would call the developing or emerging economies. Yet we have seen these same events devastate the economies and loss of life to the industrialized nations. And we’re seeing common challenges that are not known, that have no boundaries, whether it is climate, whether it is cyber-attacks or disease outbreaks, as we’ve seen with Covid. And I think that has started a change in the conversation that in the international community, it’s no longer the aid model. I did some speaking and Sweden and the last couple of years, Sweden has seen unprecedented high temperatures in the summer months with wildfires as far north as the Arctic Circle. Sweden has always been a very strong player in both the humanitarian mission, but also within the European Union in mutual aid to other countries. But they never needed it themselves until recently. And that was, I think, more difficult than they realised that asking for assistance and being able to engage and put it to work is a lot more complex for the first time.
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:22:56] Once you’ve done it, you get better. But we’re seeing this repeated now where countries that used to say we will handle our own and we’ll help other countries are realizing that this is bigger than just that. As Covid pointed out, supply chain issues where the interdependencies that are no longer independent to each nation are struggling on their own but have impacts and ramifications for everyone when that supply chain is disrupted. So, I think that the thing I noticed was a trend of moving away from it’s always going to be it’s going to help somebody to really a mutual aid of: How do we help each other? How do we build capacities, how do we lower the threshold to coming to assistance in a timely manner? And are there things that we should be focused on globally on reducing risks such as pandemics? But there are other things that we see as well. And climate is, I really look at climate disasters as one of these borderless disasters. There are so many impacts, both the sea level rise, crop failures, food and security, but then the acute effects of the storms and the flooding that you can no longer think of this is just a series of isolated events. They’re very well linked together. They are accelerating. They are occurring simultaneously across the country. And they’re putting tremendous pressure on a lot of the non-governmental organisations that respond, both in humanitarian but also back in their home countries to the impacts on the people.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:24:38] What do you think can be done to foster greater trust, greater cooperation, and what’s your opinion of the OCHA, Office of Cooperation for Human Humanitarian Aid at the United Nations?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:24:58] Well, again, I have dealt with these on the peripheral FEMA was not part of the international response in the US, but we did a lot of technical assistance and we were engaged by the Obama administration during the Haiti earthquake. But what I continue to see and talking to my counterparts at the EU and ECHO and others is we bifurcate. We have one system of humanitarian aid that goes out and then we focus internally on our domestic disaster response and within the EU, the mutual aid system, across the EU members. But that bifurcation, I think, misses the point that the line between always being in the humanitarian role and being domestic is starting to blur in some of these events. And I don’t know if we can afford to have two systems. I think we’re going to continue to see the need to merge to one system. But I don’t know how we get around the politics of governments that are reluctant because of national pride or whatever from not requesting assistance. And it’s almost like lowering the threshold to asking for assistance should be a routine thing. I mean, if you think about what the EU was able to do with their mutual aid, it’s really just a government process these days. It is not something that’s this huge event to ask for assistance through ECHO.
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:26:28] It’s actually been normalized. And I think we need to be thinking about in our countries that are used to just giving aid. That we need to normalize asking for aid and looking at what things make sense to deploy globally, but this is the least efficient way to reduce the impacts of disasters. I think, more importantly is we need to work as nations on the goals of reducing the impacts. It starts with climate reducing greenhouse gases. But I think we also have to understand that the change has already occurred. And what we have built and where we have built is woefully inadequate for the changes that climate is producing. And so where and how we build, how we rebuild, how we make investments in development on a global scale are going to be important to reducing disasters. My observation, us as they get bigger and bigger, just building a bigger response reaches a point of absurdity. We’re spending in the US close to a trillion dollars now over the last decades, just in flood losses. Think of what we could have done if we invested that money and building communities that were more resilient to flooding in the first place.
How Craig Fugate Built His Personal Resilience
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:27:50] We’ve spoken about nation resilience, planet-wide resilience, state resilience, and I’m really interested now to hear about how you have built your own personal resilience, how that has happened over the years to be able to handle these enormous tasks. Can you take us through how you think that has happened?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:28:17] This goes back to when I was a paramedic. You really need to understand you’re not the emergency. I used to I would tell people an emergency operation centers when the hurricanes would be up on the screen and they’re getting stronger. I would how people would almost be feeding off of those images and it was just raising your stress levels. And I would pull them aside and take your pulse. Like what I said, take your pulse. What do you mean? I said, just take your pulse, OK? You have one. You’re not the emergency focus on the people we serve. So I think a big part of resiliency is mission focus, knowing your job. Being able to focus on that and also taking care of yourself, I remember during a series of events where we were almost continuously activated for weeks on end. I found that at certain points of the day I did nothing else but get out and walk out of that operation center, no matter how urgent and how much was going on and just walked around the building. To clear my head and give me some space to go back in. So, I think it’s two things, is knowing your job and your mission. And not making yourself part of that emergency, because that just makes it worse and to learning your clues and signs in your body of how you’re managing stress when you’re not doing well and steps you can take. And again, a good walk, a good exercise, a couple of minutes in a room with the door closed can do wonders, but everybody’s going to have limits. And knowing yourself is probably the most important step of building resilience because you need to know what your triggers are. You need to know your coping mechanisms. You need to know what works and what doesn’t work. And you have to allow yourself down time, no matter how crazy or chaotic the event is. If you go down, you’re not going to help anybody.
Connections That Moved Craig Fugate’s Career Forward
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:30:20] You’ve spoken a great deal about how important phone calls came in at watershed moments of your career. You said you just answered the phone and you recommend to everybody, always answer the phone. Can you talk to us a little bit about the watershed moments in your life as far as rich connectedness is concerned, where you have connected with an important person and not important in terms of status, but in terms of the impact that they had on you personally and also career wise? Can you talk a little bit about that and share that with the audience?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:31:07] It starts all the way back to when I was in high school in the state of Florida. My parents had both died when I was young. I was living with my mother. I was involved in an organization called The Future Farmers of America. And the teachers that ran that program at my high school were my mentors. And I learned a lot from them and that probably gave me a good foundation and more confidence in everything from doing public speaking, parliamentary procedure contest and showing livestock. But a lot of activities that I saw them in leadership roles and kind of aspire to that. When I got out, I became interested and started as a volunteer firefighter and I began doing that. I found myself as I have moved up to that career, my first phone call was I had just been promoted to lieutenant as a paramedic, firefighter in my county, Alachua County Fire Rescue. And so that was my first real management job. And I got a phone call that basically said, now that you have reached management, we would like you to come downtown to headquarters for two weeks and work on one of three projects. And one of those projects was updating the county’s disaster plan. So I thought, well, that was more interesting than the other two. I said, OK, I’ll do that. And that phone call was in February of 1987. And I went in and part of that two weeks, I was asked to brief a new elected official and the county manager, and I knew these people by sight, but I never interacted with them.
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:32:56] I was very low down in the organizational chart, but I was asked to brief. I did the briefing and the county manager, Bob Fernandez, was new to the county, been there about a year. And he turned to my then boss, Bob Cunningham, who was director of our services and he asked: Who is this guy? And Bob told him. He’s a paramedic, just made lieutenant one at the fire station. And Bob said, well, I think we should have him down here full time. His talents are wasted in the field to that effect. So a county manager in a briefing saw something in me that he took a chance on and said, I want this guy to work on this program full time and my I never went back on the road that turned into a full time job with the county running the emergency management program. But it was just that phone call. And I picked a project and I was asked to do a briefing in that two weeks. And a person in a position that could make something happen said: He’s going to run this program and go do it.
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:34:17] And from there I threw myself into this new role. I spent a lot of time preparing and reading and studying and interacting with everybody from the National Hurricane Center to the local weather service offices. Max Mayfield, who was then one of the hurricane specialists at the Hurricane Center. I kind of brought up the challenges of a county. He’s not on the coast, but could be impacted by hurricanes. And at that time, there was not a lot of attention on inland counties. And, Max, kind of took that challenge and took me and really I think helped mentored me to understand hurricanes better. Ultimately, Max became director of the Hurricane Center when I was the state director in Florida. So, again, there’s were these connections that I didn’t seek out, but they happened.
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:35:10] I had another opportunity. In nineteen ninety seven, I got a phone call from the state. The director, Joe Myers, had an opening and he wanted me to join his team at. Again, it was more than just getting a phone call, it’s being prepared to say yes, that I’m ready to go to the next level. I’ve built a good program. I’ve done a lot, but I’m ready for the next level. I’m ready for new challenges. And so that opportunity came about. I was there from ninety seven through two thousand one when Joe decided to retire and go into the private sector.
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:35:48] Then Governor, Jeb Bush asked me to serve as the interim director and ultimately after September 11th, asked me to serve as his emergency management director, and that, again, was an opportunity to learn and work under another person that I have a lot of respect for. Working for Governor Bush when we were hit with the hurricanes we had a really good state team. His leadership was invaluable. And so I learned a lot from him. And it was interesting because we were in the US were from polar opposite parties. He’s a Republican. I am a Democrat. And many asked how can you work for Republican? I said because Governor Bush understands the complexities of disasters. The Party affiliation doesn’t count only response. And so I built and worked in that program. Governor Crist, when he became governor, asked me to stay on in his administration and then I got another one of these phone calls from Janet Napolitano, the new Secretary of Homeland Security. She wanted to meet me and interview me for a potential position with federal government. And so, again, I didn’t apply for these jobs, but I think I spent a lot of time positioning myself through working hard, studying hard, engaging and trying new things and through the reputation I built invited those calls. But it wasn’t so much that I sought them out.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:37:27] Without wanting to sound like a psychoanalysis session. Do you think that there is something about your personality that attracts people to want to engage with you, to want to help you along the way?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:37:45] I don’t know, I’m more introverted, I’m generally standoffish, and I’m not a great conversationalist. If I’m talking about something I’m passionate about, I won’t shut up. But I’m not into small talk. I’m not one of these people that like the traditional office politics chit chat. I was pretty well known. I think my reputation was, I was seen as just a cut and dried, no nonsense type of person.
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:38:13] Be careful what you ask me because I may give you an answer that you weren’t prepared for. But don’t engage me in small chat. If people ask me about the weather. I’m going to go into the forecast, the graphics, the hazards, weather outlooks. And they may intend for their question to be just a conversation starter. Is it going to be sunny or rainy?
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:38:34] A final question before you go, if I may. We sit here in really tough times in one way or another. Everybody has been affected by this terrible pandemic. Could you give the audience, listeners and viewers some advice on building resilience in tough times?
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:39:01] This is the one thing that we’ve looked at a lot. And Covid was probably one of the hardest things to address in this context. It isn’t always the ones best prepared that do well after disaster. It turns out connectedness is one of the best indicators of how well you’re going to do. Friends, families, church, social groups, community involvement, and that the more social connections you physically have we see resilience go up. Yet in Covid times that very coping mechanism was putting you in danger. And so isolation became the answer. So, I think part of resilience is, you know, we went to the web with the round of videos and calls and staying connected. That was not the same thing as the personal engagement, but it was going to have to do. But I think that historically, when we look at resiliency among families and communities, the more social connections they have, the more resilient they are, because I think it’s important to realise that we’re in this together. It’s not just me! And I think being able to share that. It’s interesting to me how often people think that they’re the only ones that are going through or feeling something. And yet as they start reaching out or talking to others, find out it’s actually pretty common, which surprisingly is almost a relief to people that it’s not just them. And then I think the last pieces got take care of yourself that. I have seen people who give and give and give and want to sleep but can’t rest. They say I can’t take time out for myself. I can’t be selfish. And I always caution them. If you wear out or you break yourself, you can’t help anybody. And so I think social connections and hopefully getting back to more of that, but also taking care of yourself. And realising that you are as vulnerable as the next person when you’re not taking care of yourself. And now you may need help and take away from the people you were trying to help.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:41:24] Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer of One Concern. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer: [00:41:34] My honor.
Credits: Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme.
If you enjoyed this interview, please check out ideaXme interview conducted by Neil Koenig with Keith Clarke, CBE.
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ideaXme is a global podcast, creator series and mentor programme. Our mission: Move the human story forward!™ ideaXme Ltd. Our passion: Rich Connectedness™!
