While many emergency management services in South Carolina are handled at the state and county levels, some cities and towns have established their own divisions and departments to bolster their ability to prepare for disasters. Some have added the emergency management functions to their fire and rescue teams, while Mount Pleasant has created its own emergency management program to handle planning, preparing and responding to worst-case scenarios.
For communities along the coast, the biggest threats to prepare for include hurricanes and flooding. But some, including Myrtle Beach, have taken on emergency response planning for large-scale, city-hosted events.
The Myrtle Beach Fire Department has handled the city’s emergency management since about 2013, with the fire chief at the time acting as a part-time emergency manager. The business of handling emergencies became its own agency within the fire department in 2017 with a full-time emergency manager, which has been Travis Glatki for the past three years. Glatki is the primary contact for disaster coordination as well as outreach and preparedness.
"A lot of people think all we do is hurricanes," said Glatki, who came up in the fire department before leading emergency management. “But we also handle any of the major special events that take place in the city.”
Glatki said he is involved in large-scale event planning, such as the Myrtle Beach Marathon and the Carolina Country Music Festival, which draws in tens of thousands of attendees.
“We head up the entire process from beginning to end — including the whole after-action report to see what we did, what we can improve upon,” he said.
The division developed a missing-persons reporting system for beachgoers that enables real-time sharing of photos and information with ocean rescue units, and shares a communications expert with other public safety agencies to help with the essential function of getting quality information to residents during an event.
“Communications is a huge part of what we do,” Glatki said.
The city recently used a grant from the Duke Energy Foundation to fund a mass notification system called MB Alerts. Residents and visitors can sign up for the alerts while they are at the beach and can stop receiving them when they leave.
The city’s emergency operations center also has a backup amateur radio system in case high-tech communication fails.
“Due to the simplicity of an amateur or ham radio station — if internet, cell towers, if all that went down, we'd still able to communicate with not only the boots on the ground through the radio, but also our local hospitals and other emergency management and emergency operations centers in the area,” Glatki said.
The benefit of having a dedicated emergency manager, he says, is understanding the local community’s specific hazards and being able to communicate efficiently with county and state emergency teams when the need arises.
For Hilton Head Island, geography was the primary driver for creating its Emergency Management Division, said Thomas Dunn, who has been emergency manager since 2012.
"We’re an island on the Atlantic. I think that’s pretty much the catalyst for having our own local planning and local processes,” Dunn said, adding that the town works very closely with Beaufort County’s Division of Emergency Management as well as with the SC Emergency Management Division and federal offices.
For Dunn, being a part of the town’s largest department — Fire Rescue — is a plus, given its resources and staff capacity.
“A lot of the operational side of larger events takes place on the Fire Rescue side — with hurricanes, that’s cutting trees and opening roadways, those types of things,” he said.
Hilton Head Island has plans in place for all types of hazards from the typical hurricanes and tornadoes to earthquakes, tsunamis and even the occasional winter storm, Dunn said. The town is one of only three entities in South Carolina accredited by the Emergency Management Accreditation Program.
The island’s most recent evacuation came during Hurricane Matthew in 2016.
“We fully evacuated the island with all our public safety assets,” he said. “We had to shut down our emergency operations center, shut down our fire stations … We went to our primary fallback point and waited for the storm to pass. Then had to reopen and reestablish everything.”
That total evacuation meant the town had to house and feed about 600 workers, including those from its own staff and well as from other fire departments, law enforcement agencies and public service districts, then get them back into position to help with recovery as quickly as possible. It led to one of the key lessons learned from the storm that wreaked havoc across the state.
“We reevaluated how we evacuate,” he said. “Do we really need to pull everything off like we did for Matthew? We now have a little more comfort to be able to — depending on the storm — leave more resources in place.”
In Mount Pleasant, emergency management doesn’t reside in the fire or police departments. Instead, it stands alone under the town’s executive office, with Shannon Whitehead serving as the emergency management and resilience officer for the past two years.
“The emergency management position was established with the town’s strategic five-year plan and was created in the executive office around 2016,” Whitehead said. “It became evident that adding resiliency would benefit the town, because resilience and emergency management are closely interconnected … We identify the hazards, we learn from events and endeavor to mitigate risks.”
Whitehead’s background includes time in other municipal emergency management offices, as well as working with Federal Emergency Management Agency. She is a team of one, funded through the general operating budget.
“Having it in our executive office, we’re recognizing that the responsibilities of mitigation and preparedness, response and recovery span across the entire municipality,” she said. “It’s not just during an emergency, but through the whole duration and life cycle of a disaster.
Mount Pleasant recently adopted its own 500-page hazard mitigation plan, separate but supplemental to Charleston County's plan. Whitehead emphasized the importance of knowing local risks.
“Even though we're an addendum to Charleston County's hazard mitigation plan, we also have our own specified hazards and what to do and what not to do,” she said.
Whitehead also oversees community outreach under the motto "Plan, Prepare, Protect." The town encourages residents to know their evacuation zones, prepare go-kits for people and pets, and sign up for the town’s Notify Me alert system.
On the resilience side, Whitehead helps departments identify at-risk areas and pursue grants for things like stormwater and infrastructure improvements. She works with the city’s flood resilience committee and a green committee on those projects.
She said that other cities can benefit from even a small office dedicated to emergency response that starts with a comprehensive understanding of the community's specific risks and needs.
“You learn from every storm or situation, and you utilize those to create best practices,” she said. “Building a robust relationship with your local agencies, stakeholders in the community is vital to ensure a cohesive approach and to foster trust and collaboration … It is crucial to establish a dedicated role that can effectively coordinate preparedness, response and recovery efforts.”