Kotzebue mayor is among Emergency Management academy graduates

Kotzebue City Mayor Saima Chase and North Slope Borough Emergency Program Manager David Engel were among students who last week graduated from the National Emergency Management Advanced Academy, held in Alaska for the first time.

The National Emergency Management Advanced Academy is designed for emergency management professionals to prepare them to lead their communities during disasters. Students learn skills critical to performing emergency management responsibilities, communication and strategic thinking.

“This class taught me more on a leadership level, how people are motivated, how people are responsive, how you hold meetings,” Chase said. “I have a lot more information on how policy works and how policy change could happen.”

This time around, 23 people — the majority of them from Alaska — graduated from the program. All of them were selected based on their ability to change disaster preparedness, response and policy for Alaska residents and tribal communities, Chase said.

“This is the first FEMA National Emergency Management Academy in Alaska,” said John Pennington, deputy director of the Center for Arctic Security and Resilience at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who co-founded the NEMAA program in 2012. The “professionals came in from all over the state and shared with each other the very distinct and unique challenges that they had from Ketchikan all the way to the North Slope and to the west, to the Northwest Arctic Borough and the Native Village of Kotzebue. They shared perspectives of Alaska from absolutely everywhere and with multiple cultures.”

Holding the academy in Alaska was important “because of the impending changes that we were seeing with climate change,” Pennington said.

“My background has been in emergency and disaster management for now 20, almost 25 years, and the most complex things I’ve seen happen are happening now in Alaska,” he said. “The typhoon Murbok probably pushed it over the edge.”

The North Slope Borough Emergency Program Manager David Engel said he decided to join the program because it is based in Alaska.

“Just being the first one offered in Alaska,” Engel said, “it would allow us to kind of add our own ... dynamic for what we would like to have seen in it. ... The examples of how sovereignty looks in lower 48 versus what tribal sovereignty looks like up here in Alaska, it’s quite a bit different.”

Within the program, Engel wrote a project exploring how emergency management programs for the North Slope of Alaska would look like in the absence of oil and gas revenues.

Chase decided to enroll because the program aligns with her long-term goal of effectively serving her region during emergencies. In her previous role, she worked as a public safety administrator at the Northwest Arctic Borough and co-led the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In the beginning, nobody knew what was going on, or what to do,” she said. “I had a lot of high-level search and rescue training and fire training, but I didn’t have the disaster” response training.

After COVID, Chase decided to get more training in incident management, starting with self-led courses. After learning about the basics such as the process of declaring emergencies, she decided to enroll in the NEMAA program that focuses on leadership skills.

The nine-month-long program consists of four courses and requires graduates to write a paper advancing their knowledge in the profession to demonstrate leadership and think tank abilities.

While working on her project, Chase closely looked at the federal response to Typhoon Merbok in which she said FEMA refused to replace such things as fishing racks to those affected by the storm.

“At the time, FEMA didn’t recognize fish camps,” Chase explained. “They didn’t recognize historical cabins that were in families for hundreds of years.”

In the paper, Chase argued that FEMA should prepare policies, recognizing and addressing the role of subsistence foods in disaster planning, response and economic valuation, particularly in rural communities.

In another project during the program, Chase collaborated with others looking into Environmental Protection Agency standards for safe drinking water and the changes climate change is causing to such resources.

“Because of global warming, the tundra is warming, things are leaking out of the tundra, like natural minerals and natural substances, we’re freezing later,” Chase said.

Chase spoke during the graduation ceremony last week.

“I may not have a traditional emergency management degree — rural Alaska has been my ultimate teacher,” Chase said in her speech. “The vastness of Alaska demands adaptable and exceptional emergency management.”