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Disaster Zone Podcast: ‘Oregon State Office of Emergency Management’

Major changes have been made!

Our collective emergency goals are to be making progress every day toward a more disaster-resilient organization and future. Most of the time there are baby steps being made. A new relationship is established, a plan is finished or an exercise is conducted. At other times, a major leap is made!

One such leap has happened in Oregon as the state Department of Emergency Management [also known as the Office of Emergency Management (OEM)] has been placed directly under the state’s governor.

This Disaster Zone podcast, “Oregon State Office of Emergency Management,” is with the organization’s director, Andrew Phelps. I think you will find the details he shares about the new organization and their direction of great interest.

Here’s the description of the podcast:

“Oregon Emergency Management is undergoing a major transition from being a division of the Oregon National Guard to now being a Department of Emergency Management reporting directly to the Governor of Oregon. Andrew Phelps, Director of Oregon’s Office of Emergency Management is the guest for this podcast. In it he details some of the key factors that made that transition happen and how the move will impact their ability to more effectively provide emergency management services. It should be noted that they have doubled the size of their workforce! This change in organizational placement happened on July 1, 2022. For a brief summary of that move see this Disaster Zone Blog Post: Oregon Emergency Management Moves Under the Governor We also discuss the relationship between Andrew Phelps and Mike Harryman, the Oregon State Resilience Officer. To learn more about that position see a previous Disaster Zone Podcast, Oregon State Resilience Officer where he was interviewed.”
Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.