Policy for Emergency Management, UMD Health/Homeland Security

>> My name is Tina Leboi [assumed spelling]. I'm a policy analyst at the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security. There we work side by side with, you know, private and public sector. Emergency managers. We create policies and plans to help everyday emergency management operations. My job is to go out into the community and educate and empower citizens to become more resilient to disasters. Other job functions include evaluating exercises in our emergency operations center and that's where we run through how we would coordinate resources in a disaster. That way we can catch anything that would go wrong beforehand so that when there is actually a disaster that we don't run into those same problems. More recently, yesterday, we had a winter functional exercise so we went through what resources we would need in case of, you know, a huge winter storm in the Montgomery County area. You know, and when it's snowing if there's a gas leak what would we do if people needed to be evacuated? What would we do? And just coordinating those resources. Other exercises could include tropical storms. You know, terrorist incidents. Any kind of manmade or natural hazard. Typically my day is, you know, a regular 9 to 5 job in office working on emergency plans, working on the outreach program. There are times when, you know, if there is an emergency we would have to activate our emergency operations center. And that could, depending on the emergency and, you know, how long we would need to activate our center, you know, it could be a couple 12 hours shifts. It could be at night. It could be during the day. Day to day 9 to 5, but it can vary if there's a disaster or an emergency.