Podcast – Reframing Hurricane Response: Craig Fugate on Survivors as a First Line of Defense

This is an interview with The Honorable Craig Fugate, a podcast by Domestic Preparedness, June 11, 2025.

Mr. Fugate, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, discusses his philosophy of emergency management with Domestic Preparedness Journal Marketing Coordinator Nicolette Casey-Phillips. From overseeing record-breaking disasters to transforming emergency management, Mr. Fugate has earned his reputation as a giant in the field.

Mr. Fugate served as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for the Obama administration from May 2009 to January 2017.  He led FEMA through multiple record-breaking disaster years and oversaw the federal government response to major events such as the Joplin and Moore Tornadoes, Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Matthew, and the 2016 Louisiana flooding.

Mr. Fugate fostered a community-oriented approach to emergency management to build sustainable and resilient communities. On his 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.  FEMA invested more than $7 billion into hazard mitigation assistance during Mr. Fugate’s tenure even as the Agency took steps to require disaster grantees to rebuild using hazard resistant codes and standards in FEMA-funded post-disaster grant projects.

Prior to his service at FEMA, Mr. 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 response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Florida launched the largest mutual aid response in its history.

In 2016, he was the National Emergency Management Association Lacy E. Suiter Award honoree for lifetime achievements and contributions in the field of emergency management.  Mr. Fugate began his emergency management career as a volunteer firefighter, paramedic, and a Lieutenant with the Alachua County Fire Rescue.

Now to the interview.

Nicolette Casey-Phillips: I have here, Mr. Fugate, who just presented here at the National Hurricane Conference 2025, and we’re just gonna do a little discussion on his experience and what he sees on the horizon in emergency management. So, I’m so glad that I was able to grab you and, like I mentioned before, I really enjoyed your presentation.

I actually saw something while I was doing a little digging on your background. Something about the “four of ’04.”

Craig Fugate: Yeah.

Casey-Phillips: Does that ring a bell?

Fugate: Yeah. Charlie, Francis, Ivan, and Gene.

Casey-Phillips: Charlie, Francis, Ivan and Gene. What does that “four of ’04” stand for, other than just the names?

Fugate: It stands for the four hurricanes that hit us in 2004. Charlie was a Cat. 4 [Category 4] hurricane that made landfall August 13th. Twenty-two days later, Hurricane Francis hit the coast, what we call the Treasure Coast, but north of West Palm Beach across the state as a slow hurricane. Eleven days later, Hurricane Ivan struck the Florida panhandle as a major hurricane, severed the I-10 bridge going across Pensacola Bay. And then nine days later, Hurricane Gene struck basically within 10 miles where Hurricane Francis came ashore as a Cat. 3.

Casey-Phillips: Oh gosh. How often does something like that happen?

Fugate: It never happened in our history.

Casey-Phillips: Wow. That’s intense.

Fugate: So that was the four hurricanes that we responded to. We had requested, got a lot of mutual aid from other states, and then we go into 2005. That’s why I was here at the hurricane conference in 2004. We were actually presenting on that response.

So, it was kind of eerie that, you know, and it was March of 2005. We were here at this conference before Katrina happens.

Casey-Phillips: Right.

Fugate: And then we got hit with Hurricane Dennis earlier that year. That was originally heading to New Orleans and came back and hit us. So, by the time Katrina rolled around, you know, we’ve already had that hurricane. We had the four from the year before. And Katrina actually started off in the Bahamas and hit Florida as a Cat. 1. Not catastrophic damage, but it was enough that we had to activate and deal with it across the state. It was supposed to come back and hit us and ultimately hit New Orleans and the Mississippi Coast. People always talk about Katrina in New Orleans. I don’t think people understand the gravity of the damage that they saw in Mississippi. I mean, per capita-wise, it was probably worse in Mississippi, but the numbers were staggering—loss of life here in Louisiana.

Casey-Phillips: Oh, wow. I’m sure that’s a great marker in your career as far as one of the most, not just memorable, but most impactful.

Fugate: I mean, as an emergency manager, you know, they kind of blur after a while, but yeah. I mean, everything’s like, they have unique things. The biggest thing to me about Katrina was it was the largest mutual aid the State of Florida had ever launched. We sent over 6,000 people to Mississippi.

Casey-Phillips: Wow.

Fugate: And I got asked sometimes pointedly, why I didn’t send people to Louisiana. And I’m like, well, because we had this agreement before the storm hit to focus on Mississippi. I had my hands full and, oh, by the way, the I-10 bridge across Lake Pontchartrain was gone. So, we couldn’t have gotten to north. We could have gotten to Slidell. But there was help coming in on the Slidell side, and so everything that was east of the Pearl River was where we were focused.

Casey-Phillips: Wow. This is my first time in New Orleans, and it just hits differently when I’m here and I’m hearing about, you know, the recollections and everything earlier. That presentation by the meteorologist, I had a really hard time listening to that just by her reaction. It’s just different now that I’m here in the city and I am able to kind of embrace what I’m seeing.

Fugate: Yeah, this area is actually, um…I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. I had family who lived out here. But it’s always kind of interesting when the Mississippi River is at high flood levels, to be standing on Canal Street and seeing a freighter go past you on the river higher than your head.

Casey-Phillips: Oh, wow. Wow. That’s insane. All right, can we get in, I probably should have started here. Can I get a little bit of your experience, your titles that you’ve had, your career? Can you give me a little rundown for our audience and subscribers?

Fugate: Yeah. That’s real basic. I started out as a volunteer firefighter, became a paramedic lieutenant for Alachua County Fire Rescue, transferred over to emergency management. And February of 1987, took over and ran the county’s program for 10 years. Got asked to join the state of Florida as bureau chief for preparedness response. Did that for a number of years. The director left and Governor Bush asked me to serve as the director, 2002, no, 2001 October. Served him, we went through a bunch of hurricanes.

He left, Governor Chris came in, worked for Governor Chris for a year. New administration got elected. The Obama administration reached out to me and asked if I would be interested, and, ultimately, they nominated me to be FEMA administrator. Started work there, May of 2009. Served through the entire administration. So, I started as a local guy, as a responder, worked my way up, but didn’t necessarily, I never applied for any of those jobs. They all involve somebody calling me up asking if I would be interested in doing that.

Casey-Phillips: That’s amazing. I did check out your LinkedIn and I saw that photo with Obama, and I thought that’s a good shot. Very cool. All right, let’s dive in. Do you mind speaking a little bit about FEMA, or do you want me to shy away from those questions?

Fugate: I mean, I don’t know what they’re doing right now, so I’m like everybody else. But I can tell you, the last time that they were gonna take FEMA apart was, as I was presenting, was in 2005.

Casey-Phillips: Well, looking back at your time at FEMA, what moments stand out as the most defining in your leadership?

Fugate: Stuff that nobody really pays much attention to. One was, we had policies on everything and you couldn’t find them. And so I really pushed to sunset, get rid of, consolidate, and I wanted one document where all the public assistance policy I could go to and find.

Casey-Phillips: Absolutely.

Fugate: And they finally put it together. And so, they were presenting it, and it was a searchable document. And they’re presenting it, and it’s senior leadership, all of our FEMA folks there. So, I said, okay, good. I wanna ask you the question, is dog food eligible for public assistance?

Casey-Phillips: You are you asking me now?

Fugate: Yeah. Is it?

Casey-Phillips: Uh, no?

Fugate: Yes.

Casey-Phillips: It is? Well, excellent. I’m glad to hear that.

Fugate: Because what happens is, much of what you get reimbursed, particularly under Category B is, does the jurisdiction have a responsibility to do that—spending taxpayer’s money with or without a declaration?

Casey-Phillips: Okay.

Fugate: Most of them have animal control programs.

Casey-Phillips: Okay.

Fugate: And part of that other part of that is sheltering the population. Which includes their companion animals as well as service animals.

Casey-Phillips: Absolutely.

Fugate: And the other problem is, dogs that are running loose become a public health hazard.

Casey-Phillips: Okay, that makes sense.

Fugate: So being able to feed animals is something that is eligible under public assistance under Category B. And that’s what I was trying to get to, is I found that a lot of times you’d ask questions and you couldn’t get a straight answer. I’m like, Look, in a time of crisis, everybody says money’s not important.

But I’ve also heard this too often to know that’s not exactly true. Everybody will ask, is this eligible?

Casey-Phillips: Right. That doesn’t surprise me.

Fugate: So, that was one. The other one, which does have a little bit, not much in Texas, but Oklahoma was huge. And that was, under the Stafford Act, federally recognized tribes were treated as political subdivisions of the states they reside in, which didn’t recognize their sovereignty and, in many cases, didn’t recognize that some tribes were actually in multiple states. Like the Navajo Nation sits in four states.

Casey-Phillips: Okay.

Fugate: So, a disaster could hit the Navajo Nation. They would require all four governors to ask for assistance. In other cases, disasters would only be on tribal lands and would never hit the threshold for the state to request assistance. And so, when we did the Superstorm Sandy Supplemental and got additional authorization to change the Stafford Act, we were able to take federally recognized tribes and move them out of state, out of the local jurisdictions, and move them into now what Stafford Act says. The chief executive—governors of states, territories, and governors or chief executive elected officials of tribal governments can request a federal disaster declaration.

Casey-Phillips: Okay, wow.

Fugate: They both recognized their sovereignty, but it also addressed some of the challenges that some states have very good relationships with their tribes. Others, there is no relationship.

Casey-Phillips: Very separate.

Fugate: Or, there is a firewall. It’s like the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Until the federal government recognized them in the ’50s and never signed a treaty with the federal government. So, there was a lot of times there was what they called “treaty tribes.” Seminole never surrendered, and because of that, every time there would be programs offered to the state that the Seminole Tribe could be eligible for, the Seminole Tribe says, “We’re not giving up our sovereignty and coming under state authority or audits. We’re a sovereign nation. We’re recognized by the federal government.”

So, it was a huge issue to me to right an injustice. The tribal governments were very clear when I got there. This was their—they were very—everybody had always given him lip service and nobody had done a damn thing about it.

Casey-Phillips: Right.

Fugate: So, we had the opportunity in Superstorm Sandy. We got it.

Casey-Phillips: That’s amazing. Okay, that leads me to somewhat of my next question. Now how do you balance urgency with long-term resilience planning during a crisis?

Fugate: Until you get stabilized, long-term is not an issue.

Casey-Phillips: Okay.

Fugate: I think there’s this tendency, I think people, they wanna try to do everything. And the reality is, the graver the situation, the fewer things you’re gonna be able to affect. So, you really focus on your life saving, your life stabilizing—and your stabilization. And those are your first days to first weeks. Where you really get into long-term resilience is when you start doing permanent work. You don’t wanna build it back the way it was because, if it failed in a disaster, it will fail again. So, it’s important. And again, those decisions will start early. So, this is not something I can push off to a year.

Casey-Phillips: Right.

Fugate: But it’s not the immediate part of response. But when we start that discussion—I’ll give you an example. When Hurricane Charlie hit Florida, the first county, the county took the brunt of it, was Charlotte County, Florida. They had seven fire stations. All seven fire stations were destroyed.

Casey-Phillips: Oh, wow.

Fugate: So, we were putting in temporary stations, getting equipment, and getting the function back up. But as we began the discussion on rebuilding the fire stations, FEMA was only willing to rebuild them to the building code.

Casey-Phillips: Which didn’t work.

Fugate: Well, we’re like, “Uh, guys, this was a Cat. 4 hurricane.” It destroyed these things. If you build them back to the building code, they would’ve been destroyed in the future. How does that make sense? Well, it doesn’t. The cost-benefit analysis doesn’t support that. I said, okay, you’re talking about the building. Let’s talk about the function of the fire station. If they cannot survive the storm to be the initial response afterwards that it’s gonna cost us a lot more money and more time to bring resources from outside the area. And so it was this idea of, they treated resilience almost like what the insurance replacement cost was and did a cost-benefit analysis and going, no, it doesn’t make sense to harden that building for higher wind speeds. You should just build it back to code because for insurance purposes, yeah, we can replace that in the future. I’m like, but what about the function of a fire station? What is that worth?

Casey-Phillips: Right.

Fugate: And we eventually got FEMA to agree that we wanted those buildings built for—I pushed for, 200 MPH winds. I think we compromised somewhere around 175 MPH winds. But it was, those are the kind of things that are gonna occur early. But they’re not gonna be that initial life saving, stabilization, getting infrastructure back up. And, but there are things you gotta, you know, be thinking about. ’Cause those decisions are gonna become pretty quick ’cause people wanna start rebuilding. And so, you gotta distinguish what are gonna be temporary emergency repairs, and then what’s gonna be the permanent work. And that’s where you really gotta focus on, don’t build it back to fail again.

Casey-Phillips: Oh wow. That’s impactful.

Fugate: And the other thing with cost-benefit analysis, it’s hard to get people to say, well, we should spend more money than we have to. And I’m like, well, let me ask you this, since most of what we’re paying for is not insured, and Texas is a great example, every one of your public buildings that gets public assistance is self-insured. At some point the law was supposed to be, you get one-time federal taxpayers’ money, and after that, you and the state own it, and you ought to buy insurance.

Casey-Phillips: Right.

Fugate: Problem is, most government buildings can’t afford or don’t have access to the insurance. So we said, well, what you ought to be thinking about is building back to insurable risk, where you put enough money back into the infrastructure that insurance companies can make a good offer and be able to provide affordable insurance. But that’s a different standard than, often, building it back merely to the current codes.

Casey-Phillips: Okay, I see. Wow. Thank you for that. Okay, now in policy and practice, how do you feel the emergency management field has evolved since you left FEMA?

Fugate: Well, I think one of the challenges that I see across the emergency management spectrum is, we talk about emergency management, and we always are famous for talking about process. We talk about the four phases of emergency management. We, you know, prepare, we respond, we recover, we mitigate. You know, all the diagrams, putting mitigation in a circle. Most conferences, people are, are always about the grants, the grants administration, the rules, the regulations. And I’m going, none of that has a damn thing to do with emergency management.

Casey-Phillips: Okay. Tell me, though, tell me more.

Fugate: Well, if you’re an emergency manager, I think there are certain things you are responsible for ensuring that you can do, on behalf of your chief executive officer.

Casey-Phillips: Okay.

Fugate: Can you warn the public?

Casey-Phillips: Okay.

Fugate: Can you evacuate the public from threats? Can you coordinate sheltering that population from that event? Can you coordinate multi-agency response to the impacts? Can you coordinate with the infrastructure providers and transportations to get debris picked up and power and water and communications restored? Can you coordinate getting the schools back open? That’s what emergency managers are supposed to be doing.

And the most fundamental one is being able to warn the public. Most emergency managers cannot or have never activated their warning system, and we very rarely see good results when people are not practiced and do that. And if you think about it, National Weather Service issues most warnings that come across the emergency alert and wireless emergency alerts. Very few originate at the local level. But if you’ve got a chemical emergency and the fire chief is saying, “I need to evacuate these folks and I need to shelter these folks, we need to activate the emergency alert system.” At that point, how long will it take most emergency managers to get that out?

Casey-Phillips: I can’t imagine very quickly.

Fugate: And can they get it done? So, I go back to the basics. If you cannot activate your community’s warning system, if you cannot—and again, I don’t expect the emergency manager to do everything by themselves, this is why they build a team. But think about it, these are very basic things. You cannot evacuate people and coordinate that—whether it’s an active shooter or a hurricane—you cannot activate and manage and coordinate all the people that need to come in to run shelters for the entire population, not just the ones that fit your plan. You know, it’s real easy when single disciplines are responding, but what happens when you got multiple overlap and there’s no clear jurisdiction and you’re having to bring in mutual aid and nobody’s really, you know, that whole thing where—the whole idea of that emergency operation plan isn’t to answer all the questions. It’s to build the framework of how your community’s gonna respond as a team and how they’re gonna deal with the stuff they know and the stuff that’s never happened.

Casey-Phillips: You don’t know what you don’t know.

Fugate: But it doesn’t change. The mayor’s not gonna change no matter what. So why are we so worried about all these different scenarios? Scenarios are good to test against, but you come back to this idea of all hazards. All hazards never meant hazards were all the same. It generally meant the organizations don’t change, just the roles they play. I mean, look at COVID. Everybody starts out with this one plan and ended up defaulting back to the emergency management plans because they were the only plans that really built a framework for all the other teams to work together. ’Cause health had designed their plans for health. They never incorporated anybody else.

When people say, you know, what do you think is to change stuff? I’m like, going, Look, guys. I started out as a local emergency manager. I had to learn all this stuff. I had to build this capability, had to do it at the state and do it at FEMA. And I’m like, look, you need to make a decision. Are you an emergency manager or are you a grants administrator?

Casey-Phillips: That’s a really good point. Now, historically, what I’ve heard is that you emphasize the whole community approach.

Fugate: Yeah.

Casey-Phillips: Is that right? Yeah. So how can local responders apply that concept more effectively?

Fugate: Yeah, the whole community, was really—my team got tired of me talking about the pieces, and it was really driven by beginning to do what they call catastrophic planning or what I call MOM (maximum of maximum). How bad can a disaster be? And we were using a historical storm, so we didn’t do anything fictional in Florida. We were using the great Miami hurricane back in the ’20s, and we took the track and the intensity and we laid it across the state and said, what would it be like today?

And we ran this exercise, and we had very much the same teams that I talked about responding to the ’04 that deployed the teams to Mississippi. So this is a very experienced team, and we’re running the numbers and we kept—and I’m sitting there listening to the team and I was really trying to stay out of, you know, I wanted my team to solve problems. I didn’t want me to come out there and tell them how to do stuff. And as they were going through it, it kept running into the fact, we didn’t have enough stuff. And the feds didn’t have enough stuff. And even if we had enough stuff, there weren’t enough roads to get there.

Casey-Phillips: Oh, wow. So what’d you do?

Fugate: Well, I asked, I was sitting there listening to, and they were talking about in the area of impact with a population of, I think about 10 million people. And we used the term “victims” at that point, and I kept thinking about it, and I went back to Hurricane Andrew. And so I asked a question. I said, well, what happened to all the people that were living there? Well, they’re the victims. We gotta supply them. I’m like, let me ask you a question. You think all those folks are just sitting on their ass waiting for you to show up? Or are they just taking care of things as they can? Why are we not treating them as part of the team?

Casey-Phillips: That’s right.

Fugate: And so we changed, started changing the terminology and call them “survivors.”

Casey-Phillips: Oh, wow. From victims to survivors.

Fugate: They’re part of the team, folks. And if you’ve been in Texas long enough, tell me that every time you guys show up, the first responders were not lights and sirens. It was neighbors.

Casey-Phillips: That’s true. I would say that’s true.

Fugate: Why do we treat them as a liability in our plans? Why do we treat them as we gotta take care of them. We gotta do everything for them because they’re, because to a certain degree, some emergency managers, they actually think this. We have to go in and take care of them, and that makes us feel great. I don’t really care how you feel. And it doesn’t work in catastrophic disasters. It’s easy in small disasters. We can wrap our arms around everybody, and we can overwhelm them with resources. But it doesn’t address the issue. The bigger the disaster, the further away and the longer it takes for government to get there. And so the idea of whole community was recognizing government, recognizing the NGOs. As in Texas, recognizing the private sector is part of the team. ’Cause every retailer that’s up and running is one less pod I gotta worry about.

Casey-Phillips: That’s right.

Fugate: And look at the public as part of the team, as a resource. That was the origin of whole community. Quit treating your fastest, largest resource as a liability. And I’ve heard this: “Well, we can’t use the public. They’re not trained. They’re not certified. They’re gonna do all this bad stuff.” I’m like, guess what? They’re gonna do all that stuff without your permission.

Casey-Phillips: That’s the truth.

Fugate: So why don’t we incorporate it? And a great example was Katrina. In the initial response, the Coast Guard got a lot of credit ’cause they had camera crews with them. But most of the rescues initially were done by locals and state Fish and Wildlife. And there was initially a call to stop that because everybody was just taking their boats to the water’s edge, launching their boats, and going out. And the initial reaction was we gotta shut that down. It’s unsafe. They don’t know what we’re doing. You know, they’re just showing up. And the Coast Guard guys came up with a much better answer: activate all our Coast Guard auxiliary, send them to the boat ramps, and find every life jacket in our inventory. And unless the boat appears to be a hazard to navigation, it would sink once launched, give them life jackets and tell them where to take the people they’re picking up.

Casey-Phillips: It’s as simple and easy as that. That makes so much sense to me.

Fugate: But for most bureaucracies, we want to control stuff. You know, the first thing you’re taught as a first responder is, get control of the scene, tell all the civilians to get back, let the professionals handle it. And I think that’s where emergency managers and a lot of public safety agencies—they can’t tell the difference between an emergency and a disaster.

Casey-Phillips: What’s the difference?

Fugate: In an emergency, I can afford to push all the bystanders back and only let in the professionals. In a disaster, I don’t have the luxury of turning off any of that. So rather than fight it, can I guide it and help it be more successful?

Casey-Phillips: Wow, that’s such a good point. I love that. Now, what is often misunderstood about empowering communities in preparedness? That’s a good follow up to that.

Fugate: Government, it’s interesting, particularly in the public safety realm. And I won’t say this is true of everybody, but the tendency is government wants control. They want predictability. They don’t want variables they don’t control. And the public they don’t control. And the public doesn’t follow your plan. And so there’s this tendency to go, I can’t trust the public ’cause they don’t know what they’re supposed to do. And I think that’s the friction, is, the more you want control, the more you want centralization, the slower your response gets, and the likelihood you’re not gonna get to people fast enough. If you go with a decentralized approach and you give up control and you go, rather than trying to control stuff, let’s guide stuff. Let’s tell people how to be useful. Let’s tell people what the needs are. Let’s tell them the things they really need to be paying attention to that can get them hurt. But just don’t tell them, “No.”

Casey-Phillips: Yeah, just sit there.

Fugate: But in an emergency, you can afford to do that ’cause you got more resources than you got needs.

Casey-Phillips: Okay. That makes sense. Well, thank you for explaining that to me. Now you’re known for being straightforward.

Fugate: No.

Casey-Phillips: You don’t think so?

Fugate: Nah, I’m very evasive.

Casey-Phillips: Are you? Okay.

Fugate: Well, no. Most people, it’s like I’m blunt to the point of being unpleasant at times.

Casey-Phillips: I appreciate it. I’m appreciating it right now. Now, what is something in the preparedness world we’re still getting wrong? I think you answered that as well. As far as the community approach and victims who are really survivors.

Fugate: I think that it’s actually kind of funny that that seems to have stuck, even today. I think the biggest problem with preparedness is we spend a lot of time writing these plans. And we then expect everybody to follow the plan.

Casey-Phillips: I’d agree with that.

Fugate: So, I’m like, I think the biggest challenge is getting people to understand your plan. If you’re not incorporating the community, you’re not meeting with business, you’re not meeting with community advocacy groups, people that may be critical of your government, may be critical of your elected leadership, notwithstanding if you’re not engaging them in your plan. You got a shelf document, and then you get very frustrated when people don’t follow the plan. Well, they never saw the plan. They never had any foot in the plan. Why do you think they’re gonna follow your plan?

Casey-Phillips: Right. They’re left out of the equation.

Fugate: So, I think that’s probably the biggest problem I see in preparedness is people think writing the plan is an end state. And I’m like, it isn’t even in the beginning, guys, you’ve got to train and exercise against that. You’ve got to share that with folks. You’ve gotta go back and, you know, update that. But the, the biggest fallacy is, I can contract that out, or I can assign that to a planner to write and then expect that plan to be a working document.

Casey-Phillips: What do you mean by that?

Fugate: Meaning that a plan is never done. Remember I said the biggest benefit of a plan is, it documents how the team works together, and how it solves problems and the structure. But it doesn’t always have the answers in it. Because some things we know, but things that have never happened are gonna occur. And this, if you think about it, EOCs are really problem-solving engines. The stuff we know how to do, they just execute. It’s the stuff that comes in that like Nim’s going, “Well, hell, we’ve never had that request before. What do we do?” Nim doesn’t sit there and have to make that decision by himself. He’s got a whole team there of state and local experts that have perspectives that he could never think about. Come up with answers. And do it in high speed under tremendous pressure.

Casey-Phillips: Absolutely. Now, what advice would you give to new emergency managers stepping into leadership roles?

Fugate: Probably the most important thing is, know yourself. I mean, that may be trite, but I’ve seen all these leadership books. I’ve been to seminars. You know, there’s all kinds of theory out there about leadership. Know yourself. Know what you’re good at and know where your weaknesses are, and then surround yourself with people that address your weaknesses.

Casey-Phillips: Okay.

Fugate: Tendency is, we tend to like people like us around us. And that then builds a team destined for failure. You want different perspectives. You want different ways of looking at problems. But more importantly, you need people on your team that are good at things you either don’t like to do or you’re not good at. But you gotta know yourself. Like, I’m not in the details. I’m not a people person. I’m an introvert. I like to read and think. People say, well, how do you go do all this stuff? I’m like, well, over time you learn to do stuff. But, a lot of what I call soft skills are not my strengths. So, I need people that have those skills because if I need to go out into communities that have had sometimes historically bad relationships with government, I need people that understand that and can go address those concerns and do something that I have a hard time doing, is sit there and listen and let people tell you their stories before you jump to conclusions or try to answer the questions without really letting them tell you their stories and their histories and why they see this as a problem.

Casey-Phillips: Wow, that’s such a good point. Now, last question. What innovations do you think hold the most promise for the future of emergency management?

Fugate: You know, there’s a lot, you know, we got everything with machine learning and AI and generational AI. You’ve got so much stuff that’s changing, and I always go back to the basics, don’t really change, but how we apply stuff. And I think emergency managers who understand the basics and the fundamentals—I warn people, we coordinate evacuation, we coordinate sheltering. Then these tools are just that. They don’t replace emergency managers; they help us get faster. And probably the biggest thing is getting to the tipping point to make decisions. Have you ever been around where people need more and more information before they’ll commit?

Casey-Phillips: Absolutely.

Fugate: That’s time. Time’s your most perishable commodity. You never get time back. So can the new tools help us get to that tipping point faster, to go, “Yes, we’re gonna spend a lot of money,” or “Yes, we’re gonna move people and evacuate people”? I think if you approach it then, emergency managers, you’re not gonna be replaced by AI.

Casey-Phillips: That’s the fear—friend or foe.

Fugate: But, as a tool, it can help you get to decision points faster. And again, I said this in the presentation, we had basically gotten to the point in Florida where we stopped waiting for assessments, and we didn’t even do assessments. We just responded like it was bad, and we would adjust downward. I could do that because I had a governor that supported that. He was more interested in us getting there fast and to make sure that we don’t overrespond or spend too much money. And I had a pretty good sense that getting there faster actually saved this money in the long run.

But it’s very difficult for people, especially if you don’t have the political support, or you don’t have the experience, to go, “I don’t have enough information. I’m gathering more information, but the window to change the outcome is closing faster than I’ll get the updated information. When do I go?” Some people say they go with their gut, some people want more information, but that’s that hesitancy, which is costing lives. I think that’s an area that machine learning and AI and now generational AI really have the ability to get there.

And again, if you’ve been in this business long enough, you run across people that their intuition is to act. And they seem to be a little bit ahead of the information coming in, and people are always going, how did you get to that decision? Why are you comfortable making that? This is actually some of the earliest work that was done in machine learning. It’s pattern recognition, but many people call intuition as somebody who sees little points of data that seem not to be relationship there, and go, okay, this could be this. We need to do this. How do you know that—we don’t even have a report yet? And they may not even have seen that exact scenario, but it now fits a pattern that, in their head. They see.

And there’s two ways to get that. A lot of experience, which isn’t really good for new folks or a lot of exercising and stressing the system and breaking things and finding out what works and doesn’t work, and always challenging your assumptions so you start to see that. But again, for a lot of emergency managers, that’s even difficult to do and replicate and maintain that. So, I think that’s where the application of AI, of taking our sum knowledge and experiences and now making that a transferable product. So, for new emergency managers that are like, “Is it time to go?” I think things like AI can help them get more comfortable that there’s enough information here without waiting for confirmation.

Casey-Phillips: Trusted information.

Fugate: It’s time to go. I mean, if you think about it, if decisions I’m making are low risk or low consequence, are easy to go. But when it’s lots of money, it’s disruptive. It may mean I’m pulling resources from other things that have happened. It gets harder. And the tendency is people want, I think with biases, we don’t wanna make a mistake. So, we want more information. That takes more time. And during that time, you’re waiting for information. What have you done? Nothing. And again, time’s your most perishable commodity. So how do you speed things up? This has been emergency management’s frustration with technology. Every time the technology comes out with better answers, can we trust it? The Hurricane Center and the weather service went through this. The models were getting so good that they began forecasting extreme rainfall events and the Weather Service is going, ain’t no way. And this is applicable to Texas and Hurricane Harvey.

In 2013, we had, National Weather Service was forecasting extreme rainfall event in Colorado. Models were suggesting a much higher number. They ultimately decided that that model was rogue and they were gonna back down the forecast because they’d never had that before, and it didn’t seem possible. The model verified, and we got the extreme rainfall at what the model said, which was almost twice what the forecast was. So, as the forecasters now begin getting more confidence that the models were really getting skilled at these extreme rainfall events, when Harvey came—again, Harvey’s making a landfall down near Corpus Christi, but the bullseye for the rain was up in Houston and it went from two feet to three feet to almost four feet in the models and the Hurricane Center and the Weather Prediction Center went with those numbers, and it validated. But up in that point, you never had that much rain in Houston under any storm.

Casey-Phillips: So it was a stretch.

Fugate: It was an event that there was no historical context for the model. And so, this is this challenge of, how do we trust the technology. Yet they had seen the models were verifying, and other events where it was forecasting an extreme event and it happened, so there was a lot more confidence with Harvey. If that storm had occurred in 2013, they would’ve probably under-forecasted the impacts, even though the models were calling for it because they didn’t trust the models. The models are like, the answer doesn’t make sense. It’s too extreme.

So, for emergency managers, is, you get more data and you start using, you know, AI tools. It’s gonna give you answers that aren’t going to fit your expectations. The problem is, as disasters are getting faster and more frequent and more extreme, your experiences aren’t keeping up. And most of the time when emergency managers fail dramatically, is because they assume the event would fit their understanding and it would fit their capabilities.

So, to a certain degree, I think AI can help. And again, there will be a lot of trust issues, and it’ll be a lot of, like, is it actually right? But, I think it’s one way to really push emergency managers out of this, the tendency is to make the disaster fit what I’m capable of, make it fit my plan, make it fit my past experiences. If it’s a record-setting event that’s never occurred before, how the hell is that going to work?

Casey-Phillips: That’s a really good point. I love that. I have to wrap my head around that, and you put it so well, honestly. I’m new to emergency management, and that makes so much sense to me. But I really appreciate your time. Okay, Mr. Fugate, it was a pleasure talking to you and hearing your presentation today.