E8. Dealing with disasters in the USA_Jordan Oster with Rumana Kabir

Jordan Oster, an emergency response professional, shares his experience dealing with disasters in America. He started working in emergency management after being inspired by storm response situations. He joined the local emergency response task force and a law enforcement special task and response team. He also explains the difference between MEMA (local emergency management agency) and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency). MEMA supports local communities during planned and unplanned events, while FEMA steps in when the workload exceeds local capabilities. Jordan takes emergency calls daily and supports staff during larger events. He shares a rewarding experience of providing CPR instructions over the phone and helping save a man's life. Hello, and welcome to my Mars Mantra podcast. Today I will introduce you to one of my friends from America, Jordan Oster. I met Jordan recently when he came to Oxford to do a DRR summer school, Disaster Risk Reduction summer school, and I was engrossed by Jordan's story. He was telling me his experience of dealing with disasters in America. So you will hear real life stories from Jordan, who works in the emergency response team in America. Hello, Jordan. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. It's great to finally catch up with you. I know we've had some trouble with that. So it's good that we've that we've been able to catch up with us. And I'm excited to talk to you today. Yes. And I'm really looking forward because we met very briefly and you showed me so many interesting stories and news from America. So I'd love to hear more about that. But before we start, I want to understand that you started working for the emergency response team recently and you were doing something else before. So what motivated you to become an emergency response professional? I started working for a I work for a small regional communication center. We deal with the police and fire services for four towns in Massachusetts. And I really had no idea what I was getting myself into, honestly. It's more it was more of a public safety job where I looked at it. We answer emergency phone lines and we dispatch police and fire services and ambulance services. And as I started to get into the job very early on, I was kind of thrown into situations where we would have storm response and watching, watching what we do with the storm response and how it affected the people in our communities was really what got me started. Kind of down this path and being interested in emergency management. You know, so the discipline in here in America is emergency management. And then there's several other focuses that split off of that. I had no idea that this whole world existed to the degree that it does. When I first started this a little more than six years ago. And the more that I've worked and the more that I've I've been a part of, the more it's driven me to branch out, seek new opportunities. And, you know, I, I recently started my master's last year in 2022. So this is my second, I'm starting my second year of my master's program now. And it's incredible to me, the whole world that I didn't even know existed just more than six years ago. So what were you doing six years ago and what triggered you to do this kind of work now? So before this, I was doing a lot of marketing and products training. Some some of it with Microsoft, some of it with Nokia brands. A lot of it was training people on how to use the product and talk about the product. I just I didn't love the work. It was a lot of travel. I was starting to, you know, settle down and, you know, I had gotten married. We had had our daughter. And so, you know, I was looking for something that was a little bit less travel. I could be closer to home. And here I am now working a job that is all hours of the day, all hours of the night, 24-7 experience, family events and parties. But I love what I do. And I feel like it's helping the community. It's allowing me to be a part of helping people get through their worst day. And so for me, it's such a rewarding job in career that I feel like I've just kind of lucked into it. There's a friend of mine who I went to school with. He had graduated a year before me and he said, hey, my center is hiring. Do you have any interest in doing this type of work? And I said, yeah, I'll give it a go. And that's kind of where we we jumped off. And again, I had no experience in what we call public safety. And now that I'm in it, I've joined our local emergency response task force. So if we have a tornado come through or a storm or even a terror event come through the telecommunicator emergency response task force, and get activated and I can go anywhere within the state and help a center that's been overloaded with calls or has been affected in communications or for the people in the community have been affected. And we can help them out and provide relief for them remotely, either from like a mobile command center or emergency operations center. I've joined our Metropolitan Law Enforcement Council Special Task and Response Team. And they've got dive team operations, search and rescue operations. And I've been a part of a few of those situations where we've gone into the woods and helped locate people and get them out into safety when they've gotten lost. And there's these things that I never even knew I could be a part of that I'm now doing because of the doors that have opened for me in emergency management. The more I learn, the more I train, the more that I do through trainings with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency. Tell us more about what's the difference between FEMA and MEMA. So MEMA is our local emergency management agency. It just works within the state. MEMA will respond out and support planned and unplanned events. Most recently, we have a bunch of big festivals in the fall, a Tops Field Fair in Massachusetts, which has been running for years and years and years. It's a big fairground. There's music. There's entertainment. There's, like, farmers markets type stuff. They come out and they respond with those functions. If there's a large storm event coming, they help communities prepare for and they staff for. The weather service has a staffing position with them, law enforcement staffing, public work staffing, fire communication staffing. And they just have a support feature for all of these events that may affect anywhere in Massachusetts, including the Boston Marathon. When they run the Boston Marathon, they've got a situation room where the room is fully staffed with different EMS providers or medical service providers. They've got race coordination staff and all these support functions that they do for this planned event that happens every year. It's one of the premier marathons in America. And they, every year, run it. And they were integral when the Boston Marathon bombing happened years ago in helping coordinate some of that communication and whatnot through their response and with the medical providers they have there. So, MEMA deals locally with affected communities in regards to either natural hazards, man-made hazards and disasters, planned and unplanned events. Whereas FEMA will come in and respond when the work that has tasked us overloads what MEMA and the local communities can do. So, on the federal level, a presidential declaration of disaster or it can be requested by, you know, the governor of Massachusetts would request a disaster declaration. And FEMA can then step in and provide aid and resources. They will manage task force response or strike teams to come in and help support efforts. FEMA will coordinate multi-jurisdiction response. A few years back, we had gas explosions on the Nantucket Valley in Massachusetts. And it affected such a large area of Massachusetts and parts of New Hampshire that the response was cross-state border, cross-town border. And they were pulling in resources from 10, 11 towns away and cities away to try and help with these explosions that had happened and help control the situation. And MEMA really helps with those incidences. And I do believe FEMA also helps out with coordinating some of that multi-jurisdictional cross-state border response. So, in average, how many situations do you have to deal with every day or maybe a week? So, for me, what I do is if an emergency comes in, people will call in and, you know, say, hey, you know, my husband's having a heart attack or somebody's got their house being broken into. I'm answering that phone call. In the event that we have a bigger storm event, I'm already there or I'm coming in to support the staff that's already there. So, on a daily basis, we're taking calls from the citizens of these communities for basic police, fire, and ambulance support. But then we're also there staffed for increment weather, large events, and whatnot. And so, I'm taking calls daily for little things. But some of these bigger events that may happen, we just happen to be there for it because of the nature of the job that we do. And, in effect, we're supporting our police and fire services. I see. So, tell me about some rewarding experiences and also some challenging experiences. On a smaller scale, I actually just met a man and his wife. His wife had called 911, which is our emergency number, and he had collapsed. And so, I had actually provided CPR instructions to her over the phone. I was walking her through how to perform CPR on the phone to her husband. And, you know, meanwhile, we've now started the police and fire services to their home. And they transported him to the hospital and we hadn't heard anything else. So, and that's unfortunately typical of what we go through when we answer the phone. Oftentimes, we don't get a resolution to the call that we took. We don't get to know if there's that happy ending or a sad ending. But in this instance, her husband made a full recovery. And they had actually wanted to meet me because I had had such an impact on his wife's care for him. And helped her through that situation and helped provide the CPR instructions over the phone and kept her focused. And they took over CPR instructions or CPR care when they arrived. And so, they showed up to the center that I work at. And I met with them and we had a chat. And, you know, his wife was, you know, overcome with all this emotion. You know, I got to give her a hug and talk to them about his recovery. And this was a very happy ending for this family. And they were so grateful that we were there for them and helped them. That they wanted to come and meet us and talk to us and share the experience and let us know that he was doing well. And that was really moving because we don't get that. It is really sometimes hard not knowing the outcome of certain events and incidents and going, you know, geez, I hope that guy made it. I see. That's really interesting. So, I remember, Jordan, when I first met you, you mentioned about someone calling you and the lady was getting flown away inside a car because of a flash flood. That was a very scary story. Yeah. So, when I first started back in 2017, I began my training. And our training process is roughly four or, you know, four to eight months, depending on how quickly it gets picked up and how quickly you move along. And I had, I guess it was March, February or March of 2018. And we had a series of Nor'easters that had come through Massachusetts. And one storm in particular really battered the shore. It was an astronomical high tide with an abnormally high storm surge. And it caused flooding in the area to the point where boats had actually washed up over the seawall and were floating down the main drive in one of the towns we dispatched for. And I had taken a phone call from a woman who was trying to get out of town and go to work. And she got stuck in high water. And as I was on the phone with her, her car started to fill with water. And the current was so strong from the water coming in over the seawall, it was actually pushing her car down the street and towards the ocean because that's where the water was flowing back out. I remember sitting on the phone with her and providing instructions, you know, and it's tough to know what to do. I was fresh off of training. I'm telling this woman to pull her feet up under her seat and stay out of the cold water if she can. I'm telling her to stay right where she is. I don't want her to get out and get washed away in the storm surge. And we had help on the way. I said, you know, this woman is floating down the street. Somebody needs to get to her. And at the time, the fire department was rescuing people out of the second story of their homes because the first story had flooded out. The National Guard in Massachusetts, their high water trucks couldn't even get into town because the water was too high for them. The fire chief actually had been able to make his way to her. He was able to get her out of the car while we were on the phone and her car had flooded out entirely while we were on the phone and she was being pulled to safety by the fire chief in the town. It was probably the first instance where I knew I was doing the right job. In that event, you know, we had bulldozers, these large front load bulldozers that were taking the scoops up the people's second story windows and collecting them out in the buckets and pulling them out of their homes to safety because the water was so high and they couldn't get out of their house. People think of Hurricane Katrina when they hear things like that. And they see the images of boats going and pulling people off the roofs of their homes. And that's something that we had to deal with here in Massachusetts. And I never once would have ever imagined that that's something that I would be a part of. You know, we don't hear about these regular disasters that people like you are facing. What future do you see? Growing up, I have never worried about tornadoes. The likelihood of a tornado coming through Massachusetts was very small. And this year alone, we've had five tornadoes. And they've luckily not done a lot of damage. A lot of this is due to climate change. You and I discussed quite extensively when we were talking that we don't think about recovery when we're doing some of these things. You know, we're dealing with the event itself and recover. And I think, to me, that's really what I want to get into and the reason that I started looking into emergency management. There's got to be some help with recovery and there's got to be some planning for these future events that are coming and changing the way that we look at life. And this is stuff that I'm learning in school and dealing with my master's degree. I'm learning about these natural hazards that are changing the way that we look at preparedness. And I think, to me, that's a big thing that we lose, is the preparedness for things that we've not faced. I was telling you, again, while we were over at the DRR summer school, California and the drought conditions they were facing, and the record snowfall out in the parts of the western part of the country this year, we still have active snowpack in the west from last March. And California has seen some relief from their drought. Because of the snowpack that was unprecedented. And I remember showing you pictures and articles of front-end loaders that the snow was over the top of the front-end loader moving all this snow out of the way. And these are things that places like that had never seen really before. Texas is getting ice storms, you know, and these are things that... You know, Jordan, this now brings me to the climate change issues. You know, do you see a sustainable future ahead of you? Because you are having to deal with emergencies and you're saying how unprecedented these disasters are becoming now. I think if people start to prepare, one of the programs that FEMA runs is a hazard mitigation grant program. And basically, my city has taken part in this, the city in which I live. And they've identified hazards that for them are real hazards that could happen in winter, storms, thunderstorms, and even tornadoes. And what they've done is applied for grants through the federal government to help them defray the cost. They've recently stored up seawalls and rebuilt seawalls to better withstand some of the flooding that we experienced a few years ago with some of our major storms. They're redoing some of the stormwater that runs through our city that carries all the stormwater out to the ocean. And they've redone it to help ease up some of the inland flooding that we've experienced as a result of flooding inland. And this is all done through federal grant money because the city has taken such an interest in preparing for climate change and recognizing there's a problem. And this is available anywhere in the country. It's been applied for this federal grant money to help them mitigate the future hazards to reduce the effect of disaster, you know, reduce the effect of hazards and hopefully avoid disaster. And I think there is sustainability there if you start to plan and prepare. But it's got to be recognized. Exactly. So, Jordan, I understand your job. You know, you thought that, OK, this job will be easier because it will involve less traveling. What is your Mars mantra? It's tough, right? When you look at it and I look at hoping, you know, and how we deal with things. I took a class once because I was very interested in how we deal. Right. And what I've what I've looked at is ways to reduce stress. We call it CISM, critical incident stress management. Dealing with the stress of an incident within a short period of time after the incident has occurred is the best way to deal with and address the stress of that incident. So it doesn't take a toll on you. And whether that comes in the form of talking it out with somebody or a group debriefing where we talk about the incident and process what we lived through in that moment. To strategizing how you move on from that, there's been a lot of research done, especially in the first responder community now, that has its roots back from World War One. They had gone back to camp. If they were sent home, they were less likely to stay on the battlefield. And as old and terrible as this sounds, if they had talked about what happened and processed the events of the battle while they were still in the camp, they were more likely to return the next day to the battlefield. And if you apply that to what people living in disasters, people responding to disasters do, if you can process all of that, they've also found that the average life expectancy of a first responder after they retire is 10 years. The adrenaline in your body that, you know, when you wake up in the middle of the night to go to a fire call, if you don't process that adrenaline either through exercise or through physical work, you know, you're woken up and it's dark in the middle of the night, your adrenaline starts pumping. So what do you do for yourself? I actually bought a rowing machine at my house. I have a rower in my basement. So if I can't get to the gym and I've had a particularly stressful time, I can actually exercise and get rid of some of that. And going for walks with my kids. I've got two lovely little daughters who are full of energy and keeping up with them sometimes gets that stress out of you and spending time with my family, absolutely. But I've also got a great support system. My wife is always there to listen and understand what I'm going through or at least try to. Talking to somebody, meeting with a professional clinician or therapist just to talk about some of the things you've been through is really helpful. And I think mental health is supremely important with what we do and you need to be invested in your mental health. Yes. And this brings me to the title of our podcast, My Mars Mantra. What is your inner resilience? And I think that talking through things, talking through problems, it will help people to find solutions to their problems and also for a better world. Thank you so much, Jordan, for giving us time and also to hear your story of how you are managing disasters and helping people to go through all these difficult times. Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate you giving me the time to share these experiences with you. Thank you.