 Welcome everyone. It's about one approval after one, so we're going to get started. So I'd like to welcome everyone to the latest edition of the webinar series of the disaster management and resilience program at age of HSOAC. As you may know, this is a semi monthly series in which we invite notable practitioners and scholars in the emergency management and disaster studies fields to share their insights and experiences. And my name is Jason Burnowski. I'm one of the associate program directors within the disaster management and resilience program, and I'll be moderating today's event. So we're thrilled to welcome today, Mark Gillarducci, the director of the California governor's office of emergency services. Director Gillarducci has been working in emergency management for more than 30 years holding positions ranging from the state fire chief to a federal coordinating officer at FEMA. In his current position, he was appointed into in 2013 by Governor Brown as director of the California governor's office of emergency services, Cal OES and Governor Newsom that reappointed him to this position in 2019. So during his time in public service, director Gillarducci has encountered nearly every hazard imaginable and participated in numerous historic events in 1996, for example, he led the search for victims and survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing. He also served as an advisor to the governor of Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And in his role in California he's overseeing numerous wallet fires such as the 2018 campfire provided briefings to our most recent three presidents of Obama, Trump and Biden. And then obviously he's also played a key role in the state's response to COVID and I suspect he also has some observations about earthquake preparedness among other things. So before I turn to director Garladucci to to offer his remarks I'd like to offer just a quick word and format so the director will be speaking for about 25 to 30 minutes. Once he's done I'll kick off the discussion with a few questions before taking questions from the audience. For those of you that has questions please feel free to put them in the Q&A function and then I can kind of ask them for you. So with that, let's everyone please welcome director Garladucci. Thank you. Thank you Jason and greetings to all happy to be with you today and get a chance to talk a little about emergency management and, and, you know, kind of in the context of what we've had to deal with here in California. And over the course of the last several, several years, which I would just say, you know, arguably have been unprecedented. I was appointed as Jason mentioned in 2013 and early early on, following my appointment, we started to really started to see the early impacts of climate change and how climate was affecting the state, which this this these series of events would take hold and would really frame how the state would be impacted by a series of disasters over the course of the next many years, the next 10, 15 years and really what, you know, much of the climate scientists have talked about, you know, we were starting to see firsthand here and it really started with two things that that that we saw impacted us. The first was the beginning of a pretty significant drought, which ended up lasting initially for about close to four and a half or five years. But with that came conditions that exasperated and accelerated I should say issues like wildfire. We began then a journey of wildfires occurring in California one more extensive more complex more catastrophic than the previous and and that really started the frame, how we were having to deal with it made us really look at all of the different kinds of emergency management principles that we had historically California is a disaster prone state we have had, you know, fires for a long time was not the first time we started having wildfires but it's the first time we started having wildfires in the extreme that we were seeing I'll talk about that in a minute. The California is a disaster prone state so we have earthquakes. In fact, we're rated high on flood potential scale outside of the central part of the United States, places like the Sacramento Central Valley of California rate number like two and three for potential for flooding and catastrophic flooding. You know, we have, you know, different kinds of environmental impact disasters, we have huge agriculture here in California so impacts to our crops etc so fires earthquakes floods. And then of course, California, you know, is just, it's a unique unique place it's a very large, and you know when many people call it a nation state, you know 40 million people international border, which, which arguably has, you know, the largest amount of border in the United States through the same to see reporter entry in San Diego County. We'll talk about that in a minute as well because that's a whole nother operational construct and dynamic that we have been dealing with it from the Southwest border, and that critical infrastructure that's throughout the state that is significant, very powerful very important for the for the GDP of the country right now not notwithstanding the port, the ports of LA and Long Beach and Oakland but mostly the port of LA and Long Beach which moves commodities across the United States from the Pacific Rim, the critical nature of that and the ability to have a pipeline and, and an infrastructure that moves those commodities to other parts of the country. We saw a little bit of the bubble of that during the coven about how, how that that it can be impacting to the rest of the country with regards to supply chain to two things like Silicon Valley where there's innovation and in in the technology space and the ability to drive technology and provide technology solutions for not just across the country but around the world. We haven't got a California is is is pretty important and that of course, a lot of that falls here at the Office of emergency services with regards to our level of being prepared and ability to anticipate and respond to these kinds of things. In fact, over the last 10 years, we ended up have now experienced the worst drought and 1200 years in California, right. That's had a lot of cascading impacts. We've managed a, you know, generational pandemic like everybody else across the world. Right, we've had multiple back to back catastrophic wildfires 15 of the most destructive fires in the state's history actually have occurred since 2015, seven of which occurred just in the last two years alone. Right. So conditions continue to get worse. And in that cascading into our power grid. We've seen an increase in the number of outages that we, we've had the impact on the power supply system. Of course we, we still had earthquakes, knock on wood. We have not had that catastrophic earthquake and that is the one thing that we spent a lot of time on preparing its worst case scenario, highest impact, highest consequence event. But we've had a lot of mid range and even, you know, we had a 7.1. Luckily it was not in that populated of an area and we were able to navigate through that, but we know that the bigger quick is coming. You know, we certainly have also had intense storms and you know that are have been very sporadic and targeted so it's not like, wow, you know they had a storm and a flood. And the droughts over. No, it, it, it's, it gives us a very small timeframe of of precipitation, not enough to end the drought, but it comes in such a way through an atmospheric river sort of concept that actually ends up impacting critical infrastructure and we've had the loss of a major spillway at the world's largest dam in Orville, the Orville dam spillway collapsed as a result of one of these micro atmospheric river events. And then of course throughout the process, you know, 2020 for example, we had, we were deep in the response to coven. We had at least something like 20 different wildfires that were burning throughout the state very significant. And we had civil unrest from the end of the Southern California all the way up to Northern California that we had to manage. All of these have been an ongoing challenge and it's resulted in us having to continually reevaluate and understand principles and concepts in emergency management. Right, so we have literally had to transform over the last 10 years, what emergency management looks like how we do situation awareness. How we lean forward, the old adage that, you know, the levels of government sort of wait, you wait until the phone rings when, you know, the state level when local government gets in trouble then, you know, or they need assistance. They make a telephone call and they request assistance from the state. Those days are really over. This is really in a one team. One fight effort, we're all integrated now that that collaborative interactive situation awareness incident forecasting, the ability to share information in a timely way in advance of a potential. Our effort here has been to really focus on what can we do in advance of an event happening how can we buy down the impacts of that event. And we can we do this in various verticals right in wildfire, you know, we have established and really amplify technology to be able to do everything from predictive analysis, looking at all the high risk areas of the state. Being able to forecast the potential for fire spread or fire start. We have leveraged capabilities like satellite technology we've leveraged partnerships with the Department of Defense through our California National Guard to be able to use do these to be able to pinpoint hotspots that that we may not see typically but you could see it through satellite and give us an ability to to identify where that is and respond to it rapidly to be able to extinguish it. We set a metric to keep all fires at 10 acres or less to try to minimize the amount of impact to the communities that we've seen year in and year out. We have built in a capability where we've got surveillance aircraft that are flying over that can rapidly downlink to responding incident commanders or for fire strike teams at the local level and see it on their smartphones or, you know, in real time on their tablets, where the what the fire perimeter looks like how fast it's spreading, what is the community that could be potentially impacted. And then that then rolls into the ability to, you know, more accurately and rapidly determine how we would do evacuations or what would place resources in a much more effective and coordinated way. But we've also built in a new capability. And if you think about it from this context, on the East Coast when hurricanes are coming with the National Center is is tracking potential storm development five or six days out. And as that storm, you know, develops their, their, their making predictions of where that landfall is going to take place and then they can warn the public and local and federal resources and private sector and citizens themselves can then act accordingly to be able to to respond to that. So I was thinking through that took a page out of that to say what can we do in the context of wildfire in California, where we can really use technology to see fire weather evolving four and five days out in advance right, working with our National Weather Service, working with our state meteorologists. And, and so we built a center it's a joint center, much like not at the level of the National Hurricane Center but certainly for what we need. We have a joint center with our California Department of Forest and Fire Protection US Forest Service, the National Weather Service, our National Guard, my office to be able to to build the center and leverage all of the, the weather technology to make an determination as to where the fire weather is going to be most impactful, what counties down to what communities and then we lay that over with high intensity fire map areas that we've done throughout the state. And when we know we're red flag conditions are going to be as a result of that, we can actually pre position fire strike teams in advance of the fire breaking out and we just put them in an area of the highest risk area. So should a fire break out those, those pre position assets are immediately on the scene to able to extinguish the fire or assist with evacuations, or if the conditions are so great. We may want to do a pre evacuation to get people out of harm's way, so that the firefighters can can focus on firefighting, right, all of this in a coordinated fashion so in the case of technology through situational awareness to other means. At the level we increase the level at which we can share that information and it has to be something that that is shared up and down between local government state government and all of our partners, and then ultimately articulated to the public. And that expansion has been really something that continued to evolve over the last few years and has been very, very successful, and we continue to learn and grow from that and all of us are participating in it. We've come without an infrastructure. We've needed to also expand our public safety communications capability, increasing our interoperability capability. We expanded our and enhanced our 911 system, where all of these things sort of start from right people calling 911, but we wanted to have resiliency in that. We work with our telecommunications partners, both at the utilities, electrical utilities as well as telecoms to build in resiliency in their systems, so that they would have and we could count on those systems being operational and and sustainable through these, these various kinds of events. So this has really been a all hands on deck approach over the last several years, and, and it's proven to be phenomenal. We've also done some innovative things working with our utilities like utilities which have had, you know, an infrastructure that's older, where we would have power lines drop and start fires. We've done some very controversial, innovative, possibly things that where utilities, you know, utilizing the same data that I talked about about what we would see in our wildfire forecasting center, our National Hurricane Center format, and being able to anticipate of possibly turning the power off in certain key areas that we're going to be high risk fire zones right it's called public safety power shut off. And so working with local governments, working with the community based organizations, publicly announcing through the community and getting people to understand that turning the power off is actually a mitigation measure to be able to buy down the risk of wildfire. And, you know, at first it was very controversial and very difficult. And the state, you know, my office we pushed out grants. We work a lot with communities access and functional needs and representatives throughout community based organizations to build capacity for those who are most vulnerable to be able to have resources to make sure that we stood the time period that the power be off and we would be able to build public utilities through our public utilities commission to ensure that the power would be off for the minimal amount of time. At the same time, working with them to build micro grids and be able to carve out key areas like 911 centers and hospitals and other critical infrastructure that we did not want the power turned off to through this process and that has continued to evolve and expand and has really been a phenomenal, I think, success over the long run. Of course, all of this has been, and I've been talking about a lot with the response operations. When you think about all of this, you know, it's that you can't necessarily firefight your way out of all these wildfires or, you know, throw through the earthquake, we have to do mitigation. We have to spend a lot of time in our principles about building capacity and resiliency. So we have implemented programs across the board starting with equity and an inclusion within emergency management programs. These these programs really, you know, all programs now all response all recovery, all mitigation grants and other grants that we do here are are framed through the lens of equity and fairness. There are there are disadvantaged communities and individuals that they can hit by these disasters. They're disproportionately impacted by these events and we want to make sure that that there's enough resources and the right resources to be able to address those. And really want to do that on the front end and build resiliency into their capacity and then help them navigate through that during the major disaster event and then through the recovery process. We have unfortunately lost a lot of communities, particularly in our Sierra front areas where every year we've lost whole towns this last this year alone we lost two additional communities in far northern California and while they're small communities, they're the entire community gets lost and is catastrophic for these folks and so we've had to learn to work and take the emergency manager principles to another level, a different level. We need forward, leveraging all of the capabilities and resources that the state, the locals, and our federal government have leveraging our mutual aid systems which we have very extensive and and longstanding mutual aid capabilities but it's not just public mutual aid it's leveraging our private sector partners. One thing I did when I came here is this established the office of public private and non governmental coordination within the executive office of the director. And that was really to leverage all of our private sector partners we have such enriched capabilities in California, whether it's in the tech industry or the groceries industry or transportation. They need to be a partner with us and so we work to bring them into our state operation center they're sitting at the table with us during emergencies as a as a partner, and we move forward together in the overall planning and so it's really leveraging the whole of community in our ability to effectively respond to, and then recover from these events. And the end and you know, going through response I mean these responses can be very complicated. Notwithstanding that you have one kind of threat you're dealing with a wildfire but when you're dealing with a wildfire during a massive pandemic, during, you know, a civil unrest all happening at the same time. And oh we could have you know something like an earthquake jump in there as well. You have to be able to effectively utilize principles of coordination coordination being a, what I would say it under understood and underestimated importance in the overall role of emergency management and bringing all these agencies and capabilities together, but having a set of priorities and objectives and metrics that are utilized that are that are coordinated at the highest level. So, here in California we have a unified coordination group that gets established the highest level. And with the governor and governor's cabinet keep keep cabinet agencies that have a response recovery role, and coordinated by a facility by myself, utilizing the authorities that are vested in our emergency services act which is very very powerful to be able to leverage all of the local state and coordinate with our federal partners to be able to respond to all these events and so that unified coordination group is making decisions based upon the action plans that come in. At the local incident level that information gets pushed up to the state operation center, which develops an overarching incident action plan, which comes up to the unified coordination group and we're looking that at all of that data in an operational period and making decisions that need to be made and prioritizing how the state will respond, how they would leverage to be able to stay out in front of these and that's where all of these different things are adjudicated, and effectively managed and then we work on a communications package for public education public crisis communications in a timely way to keep the public informed of what we're doing and so, you know, we're, we're continued learning, we're continually having to pivot to meet the, the impacts and challenges that we face. And, you know, the reality is, is that all of this has significantly changed from when I first got here. And, and, you know, it's been sort of a fire hose I guess you could say of incidents and events. We've had, you know, major terrorist attacks in the state during my tenure we've had, obviously buyer hazards major hazards material spills oil spills off the coast of California and highly sensitive and it's not was standing you have a oil spill off of the coast of California, but these oil spills are happening in the highly sensitive environmental areas of the state and, and having that major impact and, you know, cybersecurity events. These have caused us to work with our legislature in our governors to build capability. I mentioned the wildfire intelligence center. We've have a new fire intelligence aircraft, which really all hazard aircraft to get real time downlink information situational awareness. We have situational awareness tools we use a lot of data analytics that we've never used before. We also make decisions and artificial intelligence capabilities to be able to make us make the appropriate decision and really stay out in front of the evolving crisis, hopefully we can mitigate on the front end. Then it starts way way in advance we we work a lot with our communities to identify risks and gaps and then we push a lot of grants out and we have metrics with regards to building adequate mitigation and resiliency throughout the state. We have programs that are focused on disenfranchised disenfranchised and underserved communities, like the east coast California least those is a Spanish word for prepared and it's targeted for, you know, demographics within the state that typically are afraid of government or don't don't come to government for assistance right but but many of them need it the most right. We have prepared California which also looks at disadvantaged communities but it's innovative it's it's leveraging state dollars to make the match of federal dollars for hazard mitigation programs right to build those resiliency, many times underserved communities don't have the resources or the funding to be able to to effectively do a mitigation grant, but through this program. We are working with those communities to ensure that they can in fact build the capacity within their community. We are doing innovative things like home hardening and community hardening where we go in and whether it's seismic retrofits in large swaths of areas that have seismic activity where we can go in and actually retrofit homes to make sure that they are livable after a quake, which then reduces the amount of impact that we're going to have of housing people after an earthquake we can get them back into their homes. That's our first and foremost priority, but, but also in wildfire and being able to build fire resistance communities and be able to withstand the kind of climate related impacts that we're seeing now and that will last for 20 or 30 years, you know, until things change so we know that this is a marathon, not a sprint and and that we have to be, you know, building in those resiliency capabilities over the course of the next many years and you know, we've been very, very blessed with a legislature and a governor, both governors that I served under who have been who get it and understand the complexity of the threat to California. And, and understand climate related impacts and how that has cascading consequences throughout the state so from the mitigation standpoint and prepare this up through our response. And then into the recovery, right we're doing innovative things everything from debris management debris removal. The districts that rapidly remove debris, identify all the hazardous waste and hazardous materials teams that will go in and, and again, before 2015. We had none of these programs right so we have had to learn in the last 10 years how to build a massive debris management program the ability to effectively go in and clear. You know, fire debris earthquake debris, get those those that community clean and clear certify that they're ready to be rebuilt on, and then work with them on on rebuilding right and in some cases it's actually restructuring the way that the community is designed. Some of these communities were designed. Years ago in the 50s and 60s that didn't take into account the kind of conditions that we're facing today. So this gives us an opportunity to start fresh and restructure what a community would look like and when we would provide funding for that we would we would if it's a federal declared major disaster declaration we can work with with with HUD through the CVD DR program. We can work with FEMA and other agencies state agency state funding to be able to work with those communities to build a more resilient community into the future. The speed at which we move is important that the faster we can get the community cleaned up the faster the community can start to rebuild and from an economic standpoint, not just for the community itself, but for individuals that have been impacted the sooner we can get the community rebuilt the sooner that the community can economically recover the region can recover and sort of the state can recover so you know when you think about a ones or two events. You know, manageable, but when you know I have I this summer alone, I've had fires from from the Mexican border in San Diego all the way up to the Oregon border in Cisco. And I've got I've lost communities up and down the state and and or homes up and down the state or critical infrastructure. So it all has a cumulative effect and we have to think through that. As we build our capabilities to respond to all of this. So emergency management. I think, you know, the old ad is a waiting for the phone to ring is far past this is really all hands on deck. I think emergency managers. It's really important to think they need to think broadly. Many, I think I talked to emergency managers that, you know, droughts not my problem, or pandemics not my issue is helping human services or drought is the Department of Water Resources or whatever. The fact of the matter is emergency management's all of our problems, all of these things are our problems, right, we need to invest and bring the, the, the knowledge space and the ability to coordinate and leverage and convene to be able to get everybody rowing in the same room to solve a problem. Right. We operate under a concept of metrics or it's an action planning to objectives and priorities that are time bound, and those time bound objectives help us to move something very rapidly and ultimately get a community My role I spent a lot of time during disasters, you know, going into the community, the having community members here for me personally. I go once I go twice I go 10 times whatever it takes to be able to build back that trust and government to ensure that it's not just an empty promise that we're responding, but that we're there from the beginning through the middle to the end. We embed folks in these communities throughout the course of the life cycle of the disaster from beginning to end to ensure that all of those expectations are met. This this is something that is a one team one fight. There is no Republican Democrat, this is just people and I think disaster management, you know, I do know and cognizant of the fact that all disasters are political events. And I also understand that the way you approach that can be that, you know, it's a people first issue, and whether it's underserved, or, or wealthy folks and in affluent communities, everybody's going to get the resources and support they need. So, I'll kind of wrap it up there. I just would say that the last 12 years or so since I've been here. I don't know what happened but there's been this has been crazy. And I've had, you know, I've had a team of people understand that, you know, I lead an organization of unbelievably talented people. And, and they just do phenomenal work and they always always step up to the plate. While everybody was at home. They during the pandemic. This place was operational. In fact, the entire state government shut down the executive branch the governor and the governor's staff moved in here for several months at the state operation center part of our continuity of government plan. And the teams all came in and they worked their butt off and they did that while also managing multiple other events I cannot speak more about these folks I'm so proud of them and, and I'm proud of people in emergency management overall I mean, look, we have there's a lot of focus and no we are, we all one OES here in California is unique we have, we have emergency manager we have a fire and rescue we manage the fire rescue mutual aid system we have a law enforcement presence we do homeland security. I didn't talk much about our, our whole security enterprise but it's, it's pretty vast multiple fusion centers and cybersecurity center that we manage all of these were evolved as a result of threats and changes and needs. And then pulled together in a coordinated way, but throughout my tenure, it's been about collaboration right I try to make as many task forces. I try to make as many joint centers where we leverage all of the capabilities of multiple agencies, I feel like we're stronger diversified than we are as one. It's the people that really make up the, the organization and the ability. So it's really been a phenomenal opportunity to serve with them. And, and the last 10 years has been has really been something else so and I know it's not just here. It's been all over the world, but we've, I think, I think we were sort of early on, we were seeing a lot of that here in California, and just from the size and scope and scale of California, the impacts that we've seen. And how diverse California is, and both from topography from population and, and, and, and the significance California has to the rest of the world. It was really important to continue to stay out in front of these and build a very, very robust emergency management continuity program. So with that, I hope that's helpful and happy to answer any questions. All right, well, thank you so much for a great, for a great, for a great, some wonderful reflections and just a great discussion so great conversation so far. I think I mentioned the beginning of the chat that everyone should feel free that has put some questions into the q amp a function, and then I can ask them but when everyone's getting warmed up I thought maybe I could ask a few questions and then and then I'll turn to that. So you gave us like just a ton of, I don't know, so much innovation going on in California and so much you've accomplished and worked on over the past few years. I thought maybe I could turn the directions and start with like a softball question and just ask you a little bit to talk a little bit about like, what, what, what brought you to emergency management how did you get started in the fields. And what, what, how's it, I don't know, how have you felt about your career what's been most surprising with all this, all this experience you've had in this discipline. That's a great question. I, you know, it's funny because I, at a very young age, I, I was very, you know, intrigued by public service. I, I think probably from scouting. And, and that whole piece there was, I was intrigued by that young age we got involved in kind of mountain rescue search and rescue and that that sort of was the thing that got me going. And I think I was just really fascinated by that. And, and so I really spent a lot of my time, you know, even out of high school, getting into the business early on, very young 19 I went to paramedic school and, and, you know, I was very intrigued in the fire and along that way I worked, you know, in EMS for a while. And at the local level was very, you know, that cut my teeth a lot on what's happening in local communities. I'd like to go into local communities that were most disadvantaged and gave me a sense of, of, you know, what was happening in these communities and sort of set my, my philosophies on things. And then along the way I decided that I probably need more education. And so I ended up going to University of California at Davis in the attempt to go to medical school actually and, and along the way, you know, met by seem to be wife and both go to medical college. And I knew folks in through the search and rescue and fire service realm. And here at the OES that asked if, you know, I'd be interested in coming over to OES at the time I was med school bound, but there was something significant that happened 1985, which was the Mexico City earthquake, which was, which was catastrophic. California recognized that they did not have a sufficient enough technical and, you know, advanced search and rescue program for structural collapse after big earthquake and all the projections were that we in California were going to have a major major quake at some point. So they said listen we want to develop some sort of advanced capability would you be just coming on board and helping us develop that and at the time I thought okay that's kind of cool so I diverted off, finished off college diverted off on the medical school for a little bit deferred there and then came to work for the state to help build what was now known as the national urban search and rescue response system. That system of course is now not nationally it's also international, but early on, there were there were there were only some few capabilities right there was some capability in New York there was some capability in Miami and in Virginia, and then we had some capability in California, but it wasn't an organized, you know, interagency multi agency sort of approach so I studied a lot across the world, the Brits the French, you know Europeans had had a lot of advancement on this because of the World War two and they've had lots of capability for dealing with structural collapse and in massive ways. And so it's been a lot of time learning from them, and then ended up coming back and writing a program here in California, which ended up on the governor's desk at the time, and I was looking for some two and a half million dollars to get a program go and I had identified departments at the local level that would work with the state in partnership that would become the first of the urban search and rescue teams. And it sat on the governor's desk for a long time, and didn't think it was going to fly and then, and then the, the Loma Prieta earthquake hit San Francisco Bay Area, and as we remember we lost the cyber structure collapse and and we got a lot of fires and building collapses and Santa Cruz in San Francisco, and by the that evening the governor signed that into an act and we got funding for the urban search and rescue program so. And so, you know, that was in our fire and rescue division I worked in fire rescue as you know one of the chief officers for then several years, and that's how I ended up going to Oklahoma City. And, you know, because I was on the original development of the National Urban Search and Rescue Response System sat on the National Advisory Board for many years. I was also one of the incident commanders on that and so when we went to, when the USAR program went to Oklahoma was one of the first major deployments to major building collapse. When we got there. You know, I was asked to serve as the incident commander on the federal USAR response and so partnered up with Gary Mars at Oklahoma City Fire and we worked it together to be able to respond to that and you know that was sort of the beginning of where we are at with our National Urban Search and Rescue System. I did that for a number of years and then in 97 I left the state at the request of the time, President Clinton and former fuma director James Lee Witt. And I, the Congress had approved a new program. I was a new program for 25 federal coordinating officers and there was, and these FCOs had a lot of authority to help, you know, manage disasters around the country. I left this enough state and went to work for FEMA. For a number of years to do that work and it was, it was phenomenal. I still use all of those relationships today and, and the knowledge that I gained from that but I was in disasters across the country. And then came back to the state of California for a few more years through 911 as the chief deputy director here at OES. And kind of navigated the state through the whole 911 and the transfer of emergency management to Homeland Security and all that stuff that went along with that. And then in 2003 left the state again to go to the private sector and I did that for about part of 10 years. I actually partnered with James Lee Witt and opened this company we were working all over the world on crisis management and that gave me a massive appreciation and education on worldwide challenges and what I learned from other countries about emergency management. And I worked a lot in the Pacific Rim, Asia, China, Indonesia, Japan, really learning a lot about what was going on there and brought a lot of that back. And then, you know, around 2012 or so, the Governor Brown at the time here in California asked if I would be interested in taking on the role as director. It was some big transitions that were happening. And I mean, I couldn't do it first because I was still working in the private sector but then, you know, we came to a agreement. And, you know, most people don't know but as soon as we agreed to that shortly after I got diagnosed with cancer and was pretty advanced and it was in my throat. And so I talked to the governor and basically told him I probably couldn't do the job because he needed somebody strong to get through that and I didn't know if I was going to survive this. And he decided to point me that day for the first seven or eight months I was actually, you know, sick or in a hospital and, you know, they checked on me all the time and really we worked it from that angle. And then as soon as I could get back up on my feet, thank God, we hit the ground running. My first thing was responding to a wildfire in Northern California up in Chasta County. And I remember a week before that I was in a hospital bed and then I was there off in Chasta County wildfire and sort of never stopped since then I just been at it and focused in this role. And I mean, you know, that's sort of a high level summary but it's just been a phenomenal career. And it sort of drove me into this whole emergency management realm but all of the experiences from local government, the private sector, state government, the federal government, international, all of those are all pieces that help, I think, really my career and my understanding and my interpretation of how to respond and build an organization. So it's been, it's been just fantastic. Well, thank you. Let me turn to some audience questions now. So Zach Smith was asked a little bit about coordination so one of the things you talked you spent a good amount of time kind of talking about was how this change that you've seen an emergency management where it's turned into this kind of one team effort with the federal state and locals kind of trying to work together in a way that it's maybe a little bit different. Yeah, you kind of talk a little more about that what are the, what are the big challenges that you've seen what needs to be fixed you know we we work a lot with the HS and FEMA and so we're always kind of trying to understand the dynamic there and and ways that we can kind of help out and make things better than look to kind of hear your thoughts on that. Well, I still think even though, you know, we've had a lots of events that should be driving as well I still think we have a, we did we need you more with information sharing and, and this sort of collaborative effort. I think the natural progression human natural human inclination is to go back to our respective stove pipes to go to our respective corners, and not necessarily be willing to share information or, you know, the people like a structure, and I think structures don't get me wrong but I think in this case, you know, emergency management, even, even on the advance of events like during the mitigation and preparedness phase, sharing information and, and capabilities only builds a broader ability to prepare for a response to recover right. Now, you can do that by, by still understanding that you know their statutory authorities and regulations that exist at the various levels of government, but I've always been of the mind, don't. I don't want to get caught up to the point that it's an impediment to respond to a life saving event or to prepare for a life saving event, right. So we have something here, California put in place after a catastrophic event that the 92 fires and it was 92 91 in the Oakland Hills was a firestorm, burned down 3800 homes something like that. And as a result of that, we implemented in statutory statutory authority, the standardized emergency management system. So, since, as we call it was a precursor to NIMS. And the system, you know, outlines how every level of government will coordinate share information stops starts at the bottom. As far as city government to an operational area or county county to the region region to the state state to the federal. All all political subdivisions of California, in other words all cities county special districts, etc participate by regulation in this system. It's a phenomenal system, it keeps us all on the same page it helps us to all work in the same direction, but it can also be an impediment in that, well, you know, the city didn't go to the county appropriately to go to the state appropriately or the state came down from the state to the local level. And I think that, you know, the one thing to learn, particularly from these fast moving events that we're seeing that are that are starting. They evolve rapidly, and they have an immediate and rapid impact to people's lives and property that sometimes you have to not approach things super linearly you have to. It's an all it's an asymmetric event that takes a different requirement of different approach, different coordination different information share. So, if on the front end of these events, you are collaborating together. If on the front end of these events you're testing training, educating, but you use the concepts of incident command use the concept of send use the concepts of names to be able to effectively respond. And that's really important because I think that a lot of times people. The problem with standing. Just the need to want to stay in their structure structures important. Don't get me wrong, and you want to operate within a structure to the degree possible. But you also understand that these are guidelines and concepts that that you need to leverage to help you stay organized and effective, but the incidents you're facing. They're not looking at jurisdictional boundaries they're not looking at, you know, it, you know, who's getting impacted and who's not. They're not looking at the speed at which they're spreading, you know, all those are happening in a real time. Right. And so, this has been, I think a big somewhat controversial I guess to some degree with me here in California, but, you know, I believe that the that our standardized system is critical. And I think it is, it's foundational to everything that we do, but I also understand it that it's a concept it's a guideline that we operate from to be able to to all effectively respond so that's probably the I would say the biggest thing that I've seen a change. I think a big change I see this is, is really understanding the impact, you know, so, so all disasters are local events right they start and end in a local community, so many, so many parts of the state are impacted by a disaster. I don't care how you look at it economically and etc, but, but really does affect a community right so it's where people live and go to church and go to school and, and so it's really important to understand what's happening in community. We understand the equity, and, and we need to be able to address and get down into the, the, the deepest reaches of a community and make sure that those, that all those folks are effectively being cared for that was never more evident during then during the pandemic. Right, we, you know, and in here we have a situation where not just, you know, it's not just one community that's being impacted by disaster but it's the entire state's entire world. It's not just all of us, it's not just the, the people that we're responding for, but it's us ourselves that are in this disaster it's our families that are in this disaster right. So we have to think about how we're going to respond to this right and it is both bottom up and top down its sideways to be able to effectively respond to these to this event and. I think emergency management really, really took a major step forward in the evolutionary process in the pandemic because, you know, there were so many different agencies that had authorities, but they, they were authorities under their respective vertical the respective pipeline, and emergency management was able to be able to take all of those, those entities and bring them under an umbrella to have an effective state response to these whether it was for commodity management or acquisition, or resource allocation, or logistics support, or vaccinations or, or feeding people who were shuttles seniors and people have access and functional needs that they did not have the ability to get out or had no one to go to right to be able to reach all those to people who are homeless that we're going to be affected by COVID but had no place to go right and being able to build a capacity for that, all of those were were innovative and complex thinking that were based upon. What emergency management does is looks at the complexity of a situation and their solution oriented to be able to find the best resource, the best solution, and leverage the best capability to be able to achieve what objectives you're, you're trying to get to that's kind of the some of those those areas I think that still, you know, we need to stay at it. And there's a lot of things that come at us, directions that come at us that that we can lose sight of that, but we do need to make sure that we continue to information share collaborate and understand that, you know, one size does not fit all so we have to really think through that. Thank you. That was, thank you very much. That's very interesting. I'm kind of building on that one of my one of my colleagues, I'll brand or ask a question about partnerships with the private sector. And so he kind of notes that he noted that you know California is known for having good partnerships with electric utilities and was kind of curious about the involvement of partnerships with the insurance industry and kind of the role that the extent that they are involved in this kind of world in these activities. So we actually have a very robust partnership with a number of private sector areas and, and I mean, it's phenomenal, what, what, you know, the private sector has just a massive amount of capabilities and they have a lot of interest in providing support during the disaster. It, but they don't know how to plug into the system, and they don't know how to leverage their resources in the best most effective way. And that's one thing that we can really do here in government is be able to provide a pathway for them. So insurance, in the case of, you know, unique here I we have a organization called the California earthquake authority it's it's an essence that the state's earthquake insurance program it's an insurance agency, I chair the board of directors for that. It's given us an opportunity to engage more broadly with the insurance industry, we have insurance commissioners office which is a constitutional office within the state. I spend time with the insurance commissioner and our folks will be now respond to a disaster work with members of the insurance commissioners office and then we try to work with the various insurance providers. Many times brought them around around table to talk about things like preparedness and planning on the front end of the disaster, how we can work to buy down the risk, for example, if we harden a community, for example, to against wildfire. Or we can work to seismically retrofit a home. Can the industry provide discounts to individuals on their insurance premiums, or in a case where the insurance may not necessarily want to provide insurance. If we work to provide mitigation into those areas and build a more resilient community will the insurance industry reevaluate and step in and provide insurance to those communities so there's a number of things that we do with the insurance industry and you know they they have, you know, they have been pretty I mean they are working to try to find ways to be solution oriented. And, you know, at times, I'm not going to sugarcoat this I mean there's there's there's challenges sometimes when, when, you know, we want we want them to be a little bit more proactive. But we also understand where they're coming from. And that's part of that partnership and that relationship. The more we know about each other, the more we can understand what they can and cannot do and then we can leverage those pieces that that we know that they can be partnering with us on. So, I think that's an ever evolving area there's more work to be done in that area, but I'm, I see it promising and it's been, you know, getting better and better as the years have gone on. Thank you. We're coming up in the hour so let me just ask me one last question that we can close on and then, and then kind of let you go for the day. So one of the things that's just particularly fascinating about California and listen you talk is just the sheer breadth of challenge is you have to deal with. It's just in terms of the different kinds of natural hazards and threats, you have to deal with and then just the, I mean California is such a socio such a diverse state. And I'd love to hear like, you know, how did you, did you, did you institute or take, take part in kind of policies to kind of get ahead of things like to what's the not think about identifying both threats that you're worried about or things that aren't typically on the or on your radar, did you kind of kind of make that a regular part of your of your process to kind of think it's trying to try to get ahead of what the next next big worry is we do I mean, I'll say yes we do. And we actually have to because, you know, I'm all about not wanting to be late to need. I want to try to anticipate as much as we possibly can. So, you know, I mentioned what we've done on pre positioning based upon what the potential threats are going to be in the seismic area. You know, we have, we've, you know, worked with the legislature, the governor and invested into the nation's first earthquake early warning system, right, we put sensors up and down the state of California that are designed to sense the hypocenter of an earthquake that's the epicenter but the hypocenter says deep in the ground. And before the energy is emitted up to shaking level. These sensors sense that that there is going to be an earthquake coming, and we can push out a warning to people on their on their smartphones via an app. And we can tell them that within up to 90 seconds earth the earth, you know, the shaking is going to begin so drop cover and hold, stop your car. But it's, it's, you know, get into a safe zone, but it's really impactful in industry, right, think about if you're an eye surgeon and you're about to do a procedure and you get a warning that the earthquake is coming right you can stop that procedure or you can, you can roll up automatically or school alarms can go off kids can get under things or train stops automatically so that it doesn't get derailed. All of these things are all preventative things that we've implemented here and thought through on the front end. Our security side of things were constantly evaluating risks and threats constantly critical infrastructure threats to critical infrastructure for an adversaries. The domestic adversaries which are much more broader and more prevalent in today's day and age right security threats to our election to our energy grid. We're anticipating a lot what's happening with our energy grid as we move from from a traditional energy distribution system to renewables right and what does that mean in the long run if we have major disasters and you know, we, we, how do we ensure that the light capacity and capability as we move off of traditional systems into new innovative systems that these are phenomenal meetings that we have and discussions we have collaborative so much and we invest our, our universities and, and you know, folks that are thinking through this in a broader way. In the same time we're doing that while we're facing, you know, constant actual responses to emergencies, which never seem to slow down here. So it's really kind of a balance. My big challenge is, is I have a workforce that is tired, you know, they're, they're, they're working at things all the time and I wanted to think, you know, like, what, what are you thinking about in a broad sense what are you thinking about outside of the response but what are the other things we're talking about here. And sometimes, you know, it's hard to do that while you're, while you're, you know, flying the plane about what is it going to be like, you know, to build a new plane so all of that is a factor but think tanks, and I was just on a call this morning was phenomenal about about, you know, black what we call black sky events loss of the power grid, the ability to effectively have communications and address the needs I was last week in Northern command in Colorado where was getting briefed on some do the aspects on ways to power the grid. So there's a lot of work that's done in this and I think it's very, very important because you have to stay out, not just one or two but maybe five steps out in front of what the next threat's going to be and, and really anticipate that. Thank you very much. Well, we've reached two o'clock. I just want to thank you, Dr. go to G for your time and you're inside this has been a great conversation and we really appreciate it. So thank you so much. All right, we'll have a good afternoon. Thank you everybody for for joining in the great questions, but God bless. Thank you.