Very simply Emergency Management is management during an emergency. Management during an emergency is much different than day-to-day management; there is no time to take a poll, form a committee or consult with a contractor.

You must make immediate decisions, often with life-or-death consequences and usually with less information than you want.

You Can Only be Effective
The only way to be effective is if before the emergency occurs or the disaster strikes, you accomplish the following:

• Comprehensive hazard, risk and vulnerability analyses
• Identify needed resources
• Conduct mitigation activities to eliminate hazards and reduce risks
• Prepare a plan for those hazards and risks that you cannot eliminate
• Have an Emergency Operations Center
• Train everyone necessary on the plan
• Conduct exercises to test the plan
• Use an established incident management system

Rio Rancho has:

• Conducted hazard, risk and vulnerability analyses and updates them annually
• Maintains comprehensive resource lists and has mutual aid agreements to address identified resource shortfalls
• Has an aggressive mitigation program for our most common hazards (fires, flash floods)
• Has a Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan first adopted September 1988 and updated l7 times since then
• Has trained everyone who works in our Emergency Operations Center, then tests them with challenging disaster exercises at least annually
• Uses the National Incident Management System to respond to every emergency, both large and small, on a daily basis

Being a citizen of Rio Rancho you must be prepared, not scared. 

Do family preparedness planning (we advocate 72-hour disaster preparedness). 

Join our Community Emergency Response Team, our Red Cross Disaster Action Team or other volunteers who support our City programs. 

You can also take any of more than 60 Independent Study courses dealing with emergency preparedness and homeland security offered by the federal government.