Emergency planning by checkbox

Doug Dodge lives happily in the weeds. As the county’s director of Disaster and Emergency Services, he tends to the continuous updating of a 600-plus page Emergency Operations Plan, a highly detailed compendium of the county’s structures and processes for disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. He also co-authored the county’s 78-page population protection report and its 63-page hazard mitigation plan.

So it frustrates Dodge to have to bullet-point his work in multiple-choice questions and one-sentence comments. “Management by check-box is not the way I do things,” he says.

That is, however, exactly what Montana requires for its annual Threat & Hazard Identification (THIRA) and National Incident Management System (NIMS) surveys, which are meant to identify priorities in ways that inform the state’s training programs and its applications for federal funding.