FEMA Incident Management Assistant Teams Prepare for Hurricane Season

Throughout a disaster, FEMA partners with local, state, tribal and territorial leaders to support their response and recovery efforts. One way we do this is through the agency’s 18 incident management assistance teams. These quick response teams are able to deploy anywhere in the U.S. within 24 hours, allowing them to help local areas meet immediate needs for information, expertise and coordination during a disaster response. 

This June, these teams are attending a bootcamp that helps them make any final preparations ahead of the peak months of hurricane season. More than 450 attendees are taking part in the bootcamp, from both the regional and national teams. 

At the bootcamp, these teams are:

• Reviewing current capabilities of federal operations.
• Practicing communication and action plans.
• Assessing and tackling challenges that prepare them to support local response leaders.
• Testing their skills by completing an exercise based on a past hurricane - updated to meet today’s complexities and capabilities. 

The bootcamp is pairing national and regional teams together, mirroring the quick integration they’ll need to do with a community’s responders. Members are teaching and learning from each other – when they finish an exercise, they stay to see how other groups approach it. The teams include a mix of people who have decades of experience and some who bring skills from other roles in disaster recovery. By sharing their experiences, they’re finding innovative solutions to each challenge, and preparing to apply them this hurricane season and beyond.

This bootcamp is one of many trainings these teams complete year-round to ensure they’re ready to help local leaders guide their communities through disaster. Whether analyzing a past hurricane or practicing deploying with little notice, incident management assistance teams are always ready to help when emergency managers call on FEMA.