The contract is part of Oak Ridge’s Southeast Region Research Initiative, a $24 million federally funded effort to assist the Southeast in coordinating private and public efforts to anticipate, respond to and deter terrorist attacks, and to foster development of common tools and methods to enhance disaster response throughout the region.

The project is bringing together nationally recognized experts in emergency management and criminal justice to work with first-responder agencies in 16 counties in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County area to develop a regional emergency planning model that can be standardized and used in other jurisdictions across the nation.

“Regional disaster mitigation is the best way to achieve the type of multi-jurisdictional interagency cooperation that is necessary in order to plan appropriate responses to all forms of disaster,” said the project’s director and developer, Laura Myers, a professor at WCU where she teaches criminal justice and emergency management. “The regional approach is designed to deal with disasters that impact contiguous jurisdictions, including those located outside the primary jurisdiction where a disaster may occur.”

Through the project, emergency first responders from multiple jurisdictions from Charlotte and surrounding municipal and county agencies in North and South Carolina will come together to discuss ways to enhance and manage their existing continuous action planning processes, Myers said.

Co-directing the project is Larry Myers, assistant professor of applied criminology at WCU. The two WCU faculty members bring a combined 40 years of experience in field application research to the project. They will be assisted by Daniel Ostergaard, Senior Policy Fellow with IEF and former executive director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council. Ostergaard has extensive experience with public administration as a senior government official, a first responder and an elected municipal leader.

“The Charlotte-Mecklenburg region, under the direction of Mayor Patrick McCrory and a team of dedicated public servants, has really led the nation in terms of regional cooperation and joint planning efforts,” said Ostergaard. “We will build on this success to create the regional emergency planning model, which can then be shared with the rest of the nation. North Carolina has a great story to tell and we look forward to partnering with Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Southeast Region Research Initiative.”

The one-year project includes an analysis of regional action plans currently in place at the participating agencies, and a series of workshops for first-responders to improve the agencies’ planning processes. Results of the analysis will be used to develop a report on the processes, which will be presented to the agency leaders to assist in continuous planning. The final report, which will include a planning model that can be customized for other regional units, will be shared with agencies across the nation.

Agencies that will be invited to participate in the project will come from:

In North Carolina: Alexander, Anson, Cabarrus, Catawba, Cleveland, Gaston, Iredell, Lincoln, Mecklenburg, Rowan, Stanly and Union counties.

In South Carolina: Chester, Chesterfield, Lancaster and York counties.

 “No single community can afford everything it needs to meet the challenges of the ‘all-hazards environment,’ and it is essential that communities work together to combine and synergize incident management capabilities,” said Jeff Gaynor, a nationally recognized expert on critical infrastructure resilience and an adviser to the WCU team. “This project will go a long way toward ensuring sound multi-jurisdictional planning efforts.”

For more information about the WCU project, contact Laura Myers at (828) 227-2328, or via e-mail at lbmyers@email.wcu.edu.

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Last Modified: December 5, 2007