By Stephen Whitaker
The Eagle
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — The town of Needland in Granger County was hit by an F3 tornado, and the Texas Emergency Management Academy’s fifth cohort went to work Wednesday morning.
Some members served in logistics, others planned response. There was a group handling administration of the emergency response teams. There was an operations team that handled everything from public information to coordinating a wide range of first responder groups.
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Fortunately, the town of Needland is fictional and so was the tornado, but the training that the members of TEMA conducted was real. It was also the culmination of an eight-month course in emergency management hosted by the Texas Division of Emergency Management.
“This course has been awesome. We’ve been taking what we’ve learned the past eight months and really putting it into practice,” attendee Bianca Ramirez told the media Wednesday. “Today we are in the fictional city of Needland and we are currently working to help our fictional residents evacuate, get to safety, get food, clean drinking water and really just setting up lifeline sources for them.”
Ramirez had the role of Emergency Operations Center manager during Wednesday’s exercise. In a real-world disaster, an EOC manager would support teams such as logistics, finance and operations as well as communicate the needs of the community to help personnel in the field.
Each attendee was given their roles before beginning the three-day exercise at the TEEX Emergency Operations Training Center in College Station. They had a role in the morning exercise and a different role for the afternoon session.
“This to me is just reinforcing and knowing that everything that I’ve trained hard for in the past eight months is going to mean something in the future,” Ramirez said. “I didn’t really know much about emergency management as a career field until a couple of years ago. Moving [to Texas ] I found TDEM and kind of found my calling. This is what I want to pursue and help, just help people, be there for them in their worst moments and be there for my community.”
This week’s cohort of around 25 trainees has spent the last eight months at the Texas A&M-San Antonio campus learning about emergency management and preparing for their capstone project this week. Another cohort of around 25 that began this fall at Texas A&M’s Fort Worth campus will conduct its capstone project at the Emergency Operations Training Center in a couple of weeks.
Lisa Rubey took part in the academy as a student at the first cohort back in 2021-22 and then a year later became an instructor in the academy. Now Rubey is a unit chief of the San Antonio academy.
“We try and make every exercise as close [to real life] as we can. There are benchmarks that they need to make,” Rubey told the media at Wednesday’s exercise. We try and put in things that really do happen and we use the tools that TDEM has available in order to be able to make it more realistic.”
Wednesday’s exercise included team briefings like would be conducted during shift changes where members of each team shared the latest information with each other. There was also section chiefs for each team and at one point all the section chiefs gathered together for a briefing that portrayed moments in a real-world situation when the leaders gather to learn as much as they can.
One member of the cohort, Ryan Powell , served as the public information director and gave a press briefing as though it were a real event. Powell even took questions from the local media who were on hand to cover the exercise, allowing him to get practice in preparation for a situation where the tornado might be real.
“This is the time and place where we have really spent a lot of months training and learning,” Rubey said. “This is the opportunity to put that all together and to understand how it would operate with the local agencies and partnering with local agencies. Capstone is a three-day event, and we are running an incident that goes through several operational periods. We’re having a disaster event where there was a tornado with multiple severe weather events that also caused some flooding. A lot of different things going on where they have to decide how to work and engage and how to get the resources they need in order to successfully manage life-safety priorities.”
Each year’s cohort has over 100 applications. Only 24 to 25 are accepted. This past fall was the first time TEMA added a Fort Worth cohort to go with San Antonio.
Some graduates of TEMA will go on to work for TDEM while others will move on to become emergency managers in cities across the state. The members of each cohort come from a wide variety of backgrounds.
“It’s really important to us that we have a great diversity within our programs. We have everybody from college, master’s degrees, doctorates. We also look at bringing in high school [graduates] who may have some field experience,” Rubey said. “We have second career [people] — I was one of those people who came in as a second career. We also bring in our veterans who are still really wanting to serve their communities in that capacity of being able to respond. We get a great variety which really adds to the educational benefit.”
Ramirez spent the afternoon session swapping over to the GIS mapping team.
“I’m learning to take away just the knowledge of those roles. In our past scenarios, we have not had GIS or worked at an EOC level,” Ramirez said. “We worked at an incident command post level which is more boots on the ground. Now I’m learning more of the managerial. I am just looking forward to learning new skills and hopefully I do well in my GIS role.”
After they complete the three-day course this week, the cohort will prepare for graduation next Friday at the Texas Capitol in Austin. After graduation, they will take what they learned at the academy and use it in their job, no different from a police officer or firefighter who attend their own academies.
“Before this [academy] really what we’ve had is we have university degrees and we had hands-on learning experience. You became the emergency manager and you were kind of put in there and thrown to it,” Rubey said. “This is a way to help the people learn about emergency management, how the state works, how we all work together, how we learn the incident command system and how we respond.”
For more information on the Academy and how to sign up for a later cohort visit tedm.texas.gov/academy.
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