Scott Galvin is the, oh boy, the strategic, wait, hold on, I've got the manager of strategic operations and preparedness for the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and Office of Homeland Security. And also, his longtime baby is, he's the earthquake program manager too. And so Scott has kind of been a visionary behind some of our regional planning that we've been doing in the QSEC region over the last five to seven years, especially.

So I thought it'd be great to hear from Scott, you know, how states in the central and eastern U.S. are working together on post-earthquake response recovery planning and things like that. So, Scott, thanks for being on from while you're on travel, getting ready to go to a meeting and just appreciate you being here and making time. No problem. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Pascal.

Happy to be here and share the information of what we're what we're doing. This is going to be a little disjointed. I'm going to try and keep it straight so that everybody gets the benefits of what we're doing in the region.

But in order to do that, we got to give you a little bit of a history lesson. So we've been doing a lot collectively over the many years, you know, now going back 20 years. And, you know, we had a huge uptick in effort back in the late early 2000s. We had FEMA contributing a sizable amount of money to a new Madrid catastrophic planning initiative.

That brought capital into authoring the Mid-America Earthquake Center, which was housed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to run significant analysis for us in the middle of the country on what would be the repercussions and consequences of a sizable earthquake on the New Madrid and the Wabash Faults. You can see there we then had, as we do when you start doing planning, we start having data come in. We had the capability to do a national level exercise in 2011.

We then had a resource allocation workshop in 2014. And then that followed. And then we also had a capstone there as well.

So we had a lot go on, you know, in a short amount of time. We had, that was a RAW 3 resource allocation workshop. We had other RAWs take place here in 10 and 13.

And then we had kind of a drop off. We had, you know, other things kind of eating our lunch, other challenges and other disasters being really the showcase and for on a national level. And so we, you know, COVID took place and that impacted everybody, obviously.

And then we, as QSEC states, got back with Brian and we decided that we really needed to get back to this place. We needed to get back to a place where our collective hazard in the region was at the forefront and that we needed to get back into some serious collaborative and cohesive planning. And what we were finding collectively is everybody was coming out of the.

The post-COVID, you know, hangover that we all had, we all realized that we were all picking up at different places. And so we sat down and initially I invited everybody to Springfield, Illinois, which everybody had a great time in Springfield, Illinois. You should all come to Springfield, Illinois, at least once in your life.

We sat down and had our first resiliency workshop, basically sitting down and figuring out how could we collectively spend our knee hurt dollars together in a cohesive fashion. One, to ensure that we're getting what we need from QSEC, but also to prop up the functionality that we were missing from not having a catastrophic planning initiative on the regular. And so we developed a couple of years later.

We were in South Carolina and we sat down and actually did an analysis of where everybody was. We sat down, we came up with a multi-state timeline. So essentially we now have a strategic vision and a strategic plan to get all the states kind of doing the same thing every year.

At that time in 24, FEMA was just starting the plan updates in the four regions that make up the QSEC, New Madrid region. And so we actually built out this structure to actually essentially rinse and repeat every, if you will, eight years. Go through a FEMA update, go through state planning, go through exercising, go through lessons learned and conduct.

And this is what we're going to talk about today. Conduct that resource allocation workshop. Now, if you go backwards, RAH1 was in December of, and really this is the granddaddy of the RAHs.

This is really what started it. It's in Nashville. Significant amount of buy-in from FEMA, the federal ESS, states.

So for those of you who are not in CUSAC, this is really where I want you to listen up. Your state was probably there. this is what we're trying to get back to trying to get back to having an event where we as the middle of the country and we know our earthquake will impact more than just the eight states eight nine ten states that there's going to be you know we're so interconnected now more so than we were in 2010 essentially it's now been you know 16 years plus we're going on since we've had that type of event and we're striving to get back to that place, which will help us as states do our earthquake planning much better, have a true understanding of where we're getting our assets from, building better bonds with our neighboring and far-reaching states on the EMAC perspective, and essentially strengthening EMAC overall.

It may not be the earthquake, and I know we're here talking about earthquakes, but it may be something else. And now we have a baked relationship between myself in Illinois and our friends in North Carolina for our USAR team. And we now are on a first name basis.

And that's just going to make things a lot faster, more efficient to lay on resources in an event that may happen anywhere. So earlier this year, last year, we knew that the raw process was coming. Illinois took the lead and kicked off our planning process with our internal stakeholders to get this process going in April on April Fool's Day.

I like being a jokester and having fun with my ESFs and it was fun. So we held a multi-hour meeting to try and get the process going with them, explain the process, basically saying we need to develop what missions we need to execute in that first 30-day window of an earthquake. We need to figure out what we have available in-state, and we need to figure out what our gaps are.

And to do that, as I mentioned earlier in this couple slides back, we have not had in the New Madrid region, we have not had new data, a new scenario based on population movement, new threats and hazards, new consequences, in 15 years, 16 years. My joke is that that has been so long that y'all didn't have iPhones, you had flip phones. Y'all had regular cable at home.

That's how long ago that was. And so in order to get to where we had to get to, and we wanted to get to, was all of our states contributed money back to QSEC. Brian's been fantastic.

Him and his staff and support staff have developed multiple scenarios. And so our NEHRP dollars has gone back, subgranted back to QSEC due to the absence of that data being updated and current. Brian has provided us with multiple scenarios. We're working on some more.

So this is the one we're using in Illinois, just southwest of Illinois and the boot heel of Missouri. Sorry, Missouri. And it showcases what the scenario is.

So, and these are the, there's multiple slides, not going to bore you all the slides, just giving you the one, but we did bore our ESFs in Illinois, give them specific data on what was going to impact them in their functional area. And so what we've been doing at home in Illinois is for the past now many months is my staff has been meeting with the ESF to try and get to what are the missions, what do you have, what are the gaps, so that we can prepare that information for the ultimate resource allocation workshop that which we host, which we are going to soon be talking about and hosting in all the states will be invited so that you can, as a resource provider, figure out where, one, geographically you think you could actually get to, two, what specialties do you have in your states? Some states are really big into urban search and rescue, some are big into building incident management teams, others just have stockpiles of stuff.

You know, everybody's got a specialty. And so that's our goal this year and within the QSEC states is to get that data aligned and available so that QSEC can, pull it together and then offer it and ready it for disbursement to the rest of the resource providing states. So just a couple things that we're working on and how we're presenting this, and we did come up with a group assumptions and deliverables and outcomes across QSEC.

So we're thinking from impact, and I want to note the data I just showed you is off of the initial shake. And this is the hard part of this. And I know we've had other speakers provided this morning and this afternoon on multiple shake events.

Unfortunately, our data is just right now in a place where it's initial shake. Here's the stuff that's going to happen. And this is kind of the artificiality that we have to live in right now with our ESF partners across the region to say, you got to go off of this for right now.

But we do believe it's going to be much, much worse as multiple aftershocks and buildings become weaker and resources become thinner over the course of an earthquake event. So we're looking at 24-7 operations, 30 days, what are the resources for each of the ESFs? We're utilizing the QSEC data.

We're having multiple planning meetings. My staff is about ready for this project to be done because we've been at it for so long. The intent here is to get it internally done and then, like I said, deliver it out to the rest of the states so that they have an understanding of an awareness of what the totality of the need is from all states.

And I think it's going to be quite a large need from everything from communication support, transportation support, medical support, with the loss of numerous. The challenge we're dealing with right now is from the data we looked at from 15 and 16 years ago to now, a lot of the resources that were regularly counted on resources that were available by the federal government are now do not exist any longer. And they're not resources that other states have been able to develop in the current funding environment.

So a lot of us are scratching our heads trying to figure out how do we replicate and replace some of those resources that were going to be counted on 10, 15 years ago, and now they just don't exist. So the outputs and deliverables here, we're all going to get great new updated earthquake plans with new EMAC agreements between states to say, yes, you can count on us to bring you this thing for 30 days to help you get through that initial response and hopefully short-term recovery. We get an understanding of truly what our deltas are.

We get those MRPs. EMAC is happy. And we get a stronger overall mutual aid network.

So our proposed timeline, and this is where things are changing, Brian has done a fantastic job working with EMAC and with NEMA. Our intent when we started this process was to split the ESFs in half just because of our funding levels and do two RAWs, one for first half of the ESFs, one for the other half, both in December starting this year and a second one next year. This is literally just hot off the presses.

Brian and I just talked last week about this. We are going to be hosting the raw, the raw, single raw sometime late next spring. EMAC has some funding available to help support us and support all of you participating in this process with some minimal travel support.

And you'll be hearing more about this as we get into winter and we start providing data back to all of you and getting invites from EMAC, NEMA and QSEC. But essentially, this timeline, which looked great, is now getting extended a little bit, and we're adding the second round of ESF functionality into it. So it will be soup to nuts, all the ESFs being incorporated.

The QSEC member states will be meeting later this month at Brian's office in Tennessee to try and put some I's and T's on some documents to get exactly what we want from all of our ESF stakeholders. But I can't tell you that this would not be where we are without the fact that all of our states come together regularly. We come together either virtually or we come in person.

The commitment is there. We all collectively are seeing the benefit. We are moving in the right direction.

We're doing it on a shoestring, but we're getting it done. And so it is possible to move mountains with bubble gum and duct tape. We are doing some amazing work, and it's a testament to Brian and QSEC and my colleagues in the rest of the states for committing to this, laying out a strategy, and then working hard to implement it.

Lastly, I'll say you can't do this work without some sort of system. And Brian and Hal Grebe, who was with QSEC for a bit and is still working on this project, are the masterminds behind it. Basically, we need a common system to input this data.

15, 16 years ago, we used Excel spreadsheets. I think we are all still have a hangover from those Excel spreadsheets. We still look at them.

They still have value to us. But the intent now is to get our partners and ourselves into this system. and that's the work we're going to do later on this month, is to go into the system and make sure we're asking the right questions.

Here you can see COTS and shelter management teams and blankets and ADA accessible COTS. We're going to make sure we think about all the things and then ask the state to put in all the resources that they have. What gaps do they have? What gaps do they have?

And then it would be, you know, an output product that we would give to all of our state partners to say, This is the totality of what the region needs, a particular FEMA region, and a state needs. So this is the work that's coming. This system is being finished up over the next couple of months, and then we'll roll it back out to our ESFs to get the raw, no pun, data into this system so that we can work off of it and hopefully satisfy some needs at the raw end.

in late spring. So I know that was quick and dirty, but really hopefully hit the point. Eventually, for those who are outside the QSEC region, you're going to get invited to this, your EMAC liaisons, and as well as yourselves to participate, you'll be welcome.

Most likely going to be taking place somewhere in Tennessee, in the heart of QSEC country. If you've got questions, happy to answer anything here or reach out to me directly.