- You might not have thought much about it, but there's a difference between planning and a plan.

Lenny Lehman is president of the Wyoming All Hazards Association, and he thinks a lot about just that kind of thing.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming, PBS.

This is Wyoming Chronicle.

You are the head of an organization that has a fun acronym, waha, WAHA.

What does that stand for?

- It, it's kind of fun to say it.

It's the Wyoming All Hazards Association.

It's - Generally under the big umbrella of emergency management.

Correct.

Fair, fair enough.

- Correct.

Yes.

- And you, as of your day job, so to speak, are an emergency management coordinator and for Carbon County?

- I am, yes.

For the last six years.

- Yeah.

What's Waha compared to a local emergency management official?

- Well, WAHA is an organization that was originally founded way before my time in, in Wyoming back in 1968.

Wow.

What WAHA is now is, is an organization of members that include any preparedness or emergency management coordinator from really any subject matter expertise, public health, fire departments, law enforcement are allowed to be members of, of waha.

But the vision is, is from emergency management coordinator's perspective.

- Wyoming already has an office of of emergency management.

Homeland Security has a presence in Wyoming.

They're fire departments and sheriff's departments and law enforcement departments all have some emergency training there, nonprofits that do emergency work sometimes.

So with all this emergency response, why do we need waha?

- Well, WAHA is the Association of Emergency Managers.

Typically, you don't, you don't see us, you don't maybe necessarily hear about us, but we're behind the scenes supporting and coordinating all the efforts that is naturally seen on the front line.

The fire, the police, the EMS.

- You don't drive a squad car.

I - Do not.

- You don't ride the fire engine.

- Correct.

- You don't drive the ambulance.

- Correct.

- But when they need to, for example, if all three of those things need to be deployed at once, chances are the kind of planning and coordination that you do comes into play there.

- Correct?

- Yeah.

- So if we have a, let's just say a simple house fire, typically fire goes out and, and does what they do best, put water on the hot stuff, and emergency management is typically not involved.

Yeah.

If there's a, a, a bad actor, law enforcement gets involved and goes out and, and, you know, arrests the bad actor.

If there's an accident, EMS goes out and, and helps that patient victim.

But when fire is needed and law enforcement is needed, and it's a multi-agency response, that's typically when emergency management gets activated to pro to provide the behind the scenes support and coordination of those efforts.

- And ideally, the things that are being implemented there and put into place then are the result of having thought about it beforehand and getting people together and deciding what ought to be done.

And this brings me to this quote that you told me right before he came on camera from, was it President e or General Eisenhower at that time, or, - Yes.

- What was, tell me what that was.

Paraphrase it as best - You can.

Yes, plans are useless, but planning is - Indispensable.

Okay.

I don't know how many viewers made that distinction for themselves, but you have, and he did for, what's the difference between plans and planning?

- So it it, you've always heard that, you know, it's not the destination.

It's, it's the journey.

It, it's the same thing in, in developing plans.

The best laid plans are not a three ring binder that ends up on a shelf behind, you know, the, the town clerk or the city manager.

The best laid plans are the plans that take time to produce where you're putting emergency management is helping facilitate to put the right people around the table, helping facilitate the conversations.

Maybe first responders meeting each other for the very first time.

And we call that the, the blue sky planning.

We're, we're planning things in the blue sky.

And then when the incident comes, you may already know that responder that you're gonna be responding with, and that responder has your back and that responder may help you come home safely.

So if we can have those responders meet, have good robust conversations in the blue sky around a table, and talking about preparedness and how we can better work together, we do definitely want to end up with a, with a written plan that ends up on a shelf that we can reference.

But the overarching success of a good plan is the relationships that were built in that planning process and the robustness of, of people working together not for the first time in a crisis, but they've known each other through those planning processes.

- So that's probably safe then to say that the emergency that you don't want is not having planned.

- Correct.

- I said here's this big problem, if only we'd thought about it and coordinated and talked about a little bit.

- Correct.

- Firsthand and - Yeah.

- Big part of what Waha is doing is make sure that that part of it gets done.

- It is, and I think it's worth saying that a a, as the emergency management coordinator for Carbon County, we have 23 counties in Wyoming.

Yeah.

The top emergency management coordinator out of each of the counties have two lines of, of direct report.

We report to the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security and we're appointed by the governor.

And then we also report to our local chain of command.

And, and that's a little bit different across the 23 - Counties.

You mentioned that.

And that's - A, yeah.

- Interesting part of the, of at least the, the job, the challenge, - It is - Someone in, who do you report to in your county, for example, locally.

- So in, in carbon, I'm, I'm blessed to report to the Carbon County Board of Commissioners.

It's a, it's a board of five.

- Right.

- So I have two, what they call liaisons that I kind of do my, my day-to-day stuff.

If I need to take a day off, I work through my liaisons.

But then in, in crisis or event planning, it's really all five that, that I try to and work with a, a close relationship with.

So I have five bosses.

- So all 23 counties in Wyoming have county commissioners.

But not every emergency management coordinator in every county reports to the commissioners.

In some counties it's somebody else.

- It is.

Yep.

For - Example, - Some of our counties report to the county sheriff.

I see some of our EMS report to fire agencies within that county.

And it's, it's, it's a matter of personal choice, professional choice, and the way they've done things for a period of time.

Yeah.

I don't think there's a wrong way to do it.

I just feel honored that in, in carbon Carbon I get to report to the board of county commissioners and, and build that relationship.

Yeah.

So that when crisis hits, I, I work with them to set policy, open up funding channels.

Right.

Continuity of operations.

So I'm tied in right at that, that highest level.

- Is there some benefit as you see it, based on your experience of having that reporting done to an elected body at least?

Or is that, how important is that, do you think?

- Well, for me, I, I I think it's direly important 'cause that's the county that I'm in.

Yeah.

But across the state, I, I, I see great work being done in, in all 23 counties.

Sure.

Regardless of, of the report and what I like to say, what we like to say in emergency management, it's, it's really all about relationship.

- Yeah.

- We, we don't necessarily have any authority.

Some emergency management coordinators have direct reports.

They have a deputy or an assistant.

I am a, a department of one.

But outside of those direct reports, we can't tell the sheriff's department to do anything and fire to do anything.

But it's all about relationships.

Right.

It's all about influence and, and trying to show by experience and show by example.

- Yeah.

- That maybe there's a better way or a different way.

- So that fire chief who's out there on the fire lines with a, maybe with a megaphone or something, or with a hose, he knows Lenny is there as a resource, someone you've talked, that he's talked to, and you can work together in a way that can be absolutely vital.

- Correct.

- Yeah.

- Correct.

If you think about it, if you, if we're talking on a fire line, if we have a big wildfire, right.

Our wildland and firefighters are, are the professionals.

And if you've heard of what's called incident command system Yeah.

It's, it's a structure and there's always an ic, an incident commander, and then there's always operations and operations are the, the boots on the ground.

- Yeah.

- They're the, the fire line crews, the water drops, the sheriff's department doing evacuations, but back in what we call the emergency operations center, emergency managers can support and, and coordinate a larger working force that takes care of potentially all the logistics that need to be done.

All the planning, all the finance, public information, liaisoning, that doesn't necessarily need to be done at the incident command post.

Yeah.

It can be better served back at a, a, a location that has dedicated power, good comms, reliable communications that we can take care of all those behind the scenes efforts.

- Yeah.

I'm reminded of the modern day proverb that I think I first heard in a movie, which was, which is HOPE is not a plan.

- Correct.

- You've probably seen some occasions where a little bit, little bit of better planning might have made for a better outcome.

Right.

- For sure.

For sure.

And, and it's always a, a delicate dance that, that we play in, in emergency management because after an event, there's a thing that sometimes we help facilitate.

And it's called an a a R and after action review.

And there's also a process called an ip, an improvement plan.

And I like to say that a, a after action review without an improvement plan, an a a R without an IP is like a sports car without tires.

Yeah.

It looks really good, but it really isn't gonna go anywhere.

So what we do is in those after action reviews, we, we take those lessons learned, and in a crisis, we make the assumption that everybody responded with the right intentions and responded to the best of their ability.

So we're not looking to, to say who did something wrong, but what we're looking for in those AAR ips is what processes may not have been the best processes, and how can we improve processes?

And then what gets missed a lot of times is what went well.

And sometimes something went really well, possibly by fluke, possibly it wasn't part of an SOGA standard operating guideline or a standing operating principle, and somebody just intuitively knew to do that.

Well, what we wanna do in emergency management is capture that best, vet it and go, that is a phenomenal process to add.

And then we behind the scenes add it into, you know, different processes, different plans, different procedures, - So that the next time out, the people that still have those great intentions - Yes.

- Have a little bit more, some more better toolbox to work with then.

- Correct.

There's a great quote that John Maxwell, he's an author that I tend to have gone to in the past.

In every adversity, there's seeds of equal or greater benefit.

And that's really true that, that most people individually, personally, and professionally learn more from a mistake that might have been made than a success.

So as long as that mistake isn't, you know, something that's continual and cost somebody, you know, their house, their life mistakes are an opportunity to, to learn and to grow.

So in those adversities are the times that we really come together and, and do most of our planning.

- You've told me earlier that there's a, a set of preparedness goals on a almost an overarching scale that you're thinking about and trying to get everybody coordinated toward.

What are those?

- These came out of really nine 11, those lessons learned.

It's called the National Preparedness Goals.

- Okay.

- And outta the National Preparedness Goals, there's five mission areas, and those are the, the marching orders, the, the job descriptions of the emergency management coordinators.

And the five missionaries are prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery.

Now, within each of those five mission areas, larger jurisdictions have subject matter experts that just live in one of those missionaries.

Right.

For example, recovery.

They're hired to perform job duties that are about recovering after a natural or manmade disaster.

And that's their job.

It's all about recovery.

Emergency management coordinators work in all five of those.

And under those five, we break 'em down into what's called the 32 core capabilities.

And there's 32 overarching core capabilities that we need to have some level of understanding and some influence over within our perspective regions.

And then with those 32 core capabilities, there's a process called poe, P-O-E-T-E.

It's planning, it's organizing, it's equipping it's training and it's exercises.

So as an example, when we go into an after action review, we break all the, the lessons learned down.

If there was a, a new process that needs to be developed or a a new, you know, something needed to occur differently, it's either planning needs to be different organization equipment training or exercises.

So that ti element falls to those 32 core capabilities under those five mission areas.

So it's, it's, it's a big lift.

I, you asked me, you know, one of the challenges with being an emergency manager, it's, it's not being an expert in any one of those, but it's like having a, a huge, big Rolodex and having lots of friends and influence and knowing who to call when a particular incident or crisis occurs.

- We get back to planning here, just planning, I imagine the work around the conference table on the phone among people to come up with this structure that you've just described isn't perfect.

Probably evolving all the time, but trying to put it in place so that contingencies can at least be addressed - Correct.

- With something that's already been thought about.

- Right.

Right.

- What draws a person to this kind of work?

- Wow, that's a great question.

Well, I, without sounding, you know, two out there, I feel like I'm, I'm called to be an emergency manager.

I'm called to do what I'm supposed to be doing, where I'm supposed to be doing it with the people I'm supposed to be doing it with.

And for and at this time, and if you think about it, sheriff's departments, law enforcement, highway patrol, fire agencies, fire departments, fire districts, EMS, they're all type A personalities.

They're all extreme hard chargers.

And now you introduce, you know, emergency management into the mix.

And, you know, we have to, we have to walk a, a thin line.

We're, we're certainly never telling fire how to put a fire out or law how to arrest a bad guy.

But as we stand back and see those two agencies, we might have a little bit of a different lens, a little bit different perspective, but it's in all how we communicate that perspective and influence those top leaders to potentially look inside and, and possibly make some internal changes based on influence, experience, history.

And that all comes with, you know, some bumps and bruises and, and some trials and tribulations.

- You have to establish your credibility with some people as you the hard chargers.

But some of them were elected.

- Correct.

- Some of 'em have been on the job for 40 years.

- Correct.

- Did it just like their dad and their grandfather did before them.

This is how we do things.

- Yes.

- And here comes linean.

Any particular training that you've had that helps you go down those, those roads?

- Well, I, I feel that every job that I've ever had, every position that I've ever has led me to becoming emergency management.

Because it, it's, it's all about influence.

It's all about relationships.

It's, it's about seeing a, a potentially a bigger picture, but then also being resilient and, and confident enough to, to share an idea and, and, and be told that won't work here.

And to understand that maybe they're right and potentially they are.

And then to find a different way to, to either package it, communicate about it, or just go back to the drawing board and go, you know, they're absolutely right.

Where did I error?

So it's very humbling.

Yeah.

And it's also extremely rewarding.

And anybody that is looking at emergency management that wants to get the, the kudos, the, the recognitions, the, the fame is, should not go into emergency management.

'cause we do our best work when we are behind the scenes supporting, coordinating, and then we make our, our frontline, you know, the star of the show, which they are, they're putting their life on the lines to save that family to, to pull that flood victim out to, you know, do that rescue.

We're behind the scenes, just giving them the, the tools that they need when they need it.

- You mentioned, without getting into specifics of an occasion fairly recently where something kind this, like, this kind of happened where lots of things had to come together Right.

To get the outcome that we wanted.

And you became aware that some of the higher ups didn't really even understand what the role of emergency management even had been.

- Right.

- And you weren't standing up there saying, Hey, look at me, everybody.

But - Right.

- Would've been kind of nice, at least if there was an understanding - Right.

- That you and your people - Yes.

- In your occupation, were there making a big difference.

- For sure.

And it, it, it's, it's one of those fine lines again, that kind of, that dichotomy is that as we report to our elected officials or are, are agencies specific that those EMS report to, that there's an awareness across Wyoming, which is one of the, the missions I have for being president of waha is, is to be able to paint those stories that when there's a success, that that success gets translated across the state.

And then we also have an awareness that behind the scenes there's an incredible workforce that's has been activated to, to provide support and coordination.

And it, it's a dichotomy because in no way do I want to try to push emergency management out to be the face of any of those things, but an awareness across the state that emergency management is an essential tool, and that we're behind the scenes probably every event that requires more than one agency being responded to.

Anywhere in Wyoming, there's an emergency management coordinator somewhere in a room providing sit reps, providing spot weather forecasts, providing resource requests, providing information from the IC directly to elected officials so that the IC can maintain, you know, his or her focus.

So there's an incredible value that's being done.

And just that awareness is something that I'm, I'm passionate about helping.

Everybody in Wyoming are more known in Wyoming that it's occurring.

- Yeah.

A part of it certainly is recognizing the individuals.

So many of these people doing this work are volunteers.

- They are, - Gosh, that's just, that's something that has, has to be known virtually everywhere.

But also this recognition for people that control funding, for example, they need to know, well, here's what the emergency management office did.

- Right.

- And they need the sufficient budget.

They need sufficient staff, they need sufficient facilities - For sure.

- And if nobody knows what they're doing, then it's harder to make that case all of a sudden.

What do you mean you need money?

Well, helps 'em pay attention before we get to that point.

- Correct.

Yeah.

And it, it, it's hard to be a, a prophet in your own homeland.

And that's one of the, the benefits of, of Waha is that I can, you know, I can sound the horn and, and share the praise for all the great works that's being done in, in some of the other counties and that association can, you know, address and, and communicate some of the successes that are occurring in, in carbon.

And it just makes it, it, it makes it more real and, and brings it down home.

- Well, that Coronavirus pandemic really opened a lot of people's eyes and it's changed a lot of things permanently.

- I think it changed a lot of things and not all for the good.

One of the things that it, that it opened up was this whole idea of virtual meetings.

- Yeah.

- Which can be a good thing.

Virtual meetings can be a good thing, but it, it's an easy thing, easy trap to fall into.

And when we're talking about true planning and as far as emergency management, and we think a virtual meeting can add that value, what we're more focused on is the end product, that three ring binder that's sitting on the shelf as opposed to those two individuals sitting at the table face to face, getting to know each other's temperaments, getting to know each other's experience.

So when that bad day happens, they're not meeting for the first time.

And that's really, really, really difficult to do over a teams or a zooms call.

- Yeah.

Is your job ever finished - It?

Never, absolutely.

I don't think so.

No.

It, it, it never is.

- When you mentioned nine 11, we mentioned the COVID pandemic.

- Yeah.

- You probably, we probably both know sitting here, something's coming.

That'll be a huge defining event as well.

- Right.

- And we'll be ready for it.

- I believe that the state will be ready for it.

Yeah.

I think Wyoming Office of Homeland Security in, you know, partnership with the emergency managers through waha, we always say that it's not a matter of if that bad day comes, it's, it's when there's an open door open invitation, reach out, find out who your county emergency management coordinator is, find their name, their number, their email, reach out to him or her.

Ask how you could potentially help and support that coordinator, either as a volunteer or as a resident that can better prepare themselves for the times that are coming.

Yeah.

And either one of those is, is an incredible value.

Back to the emergency management program.

- People, I'm afraid too often have this worry or sense that they're somehow intruding or imposing on this person.

This is someone who's gonna be glad to take that call.

Right?

- Absolutely.

Yeah.

And what we find is that in, in all of our communities, there's a, I believe there's a, a really an untapped resource.

Yeah.

And it's our phenomenal retired individuals, - Interesting - Men and women, whether it's from law enforcement, from military, from school districts, that when crisis comes, not if, but when they want, they want to be able to help.

They don't want to sit back.

They want to be able to help.

And one of the best ways that they can help in the blue sky is, is reach out to your emergency manager.

And there's lots of different programs that we have, whether it's potentially staffing an emergency operations center, potentially staffing a shelter, potentially, you know, running logistics around the county, food, water.

There's just a huge amount of work that needs to be done.

And who better to do it than the folks that live in that affected area.

So that not only can they help, but they feel that they're, that they are helping.

And chances are they're not gonna be able to put on a, a uniform and go arrest somebody or put on, you know, bunker gear and go put out a fire.

But emergency management has lots of plates that are spinning and their expertise, their, their seasoned work in whatever profession they come from is, is needed.

And emergency management can use them.

For sure.

Yeah.

- Well, I'm glad you're here.

Thank you.

Glad you're in Wyoming traveling, conferring planning.

Yes.

And for the state of Wyoming's, the better for it.

I appreciate the kind words.

Lenny Lehman, Wyoming, all Hazards Association President, appreciate your time.

Thanks for being with us on Wyoming Cross.