Emergency Management
Modernizing Emergency Plans Before Outdated Binders Became a Liability
Brief #
OB-2026-1
Date Prepared
On Period
Jun-Dec 2025
Status
Active
Population
68,000
Team Size
4 Personnel
Nearest Metro
Columbus (30 min)
Accreditation
EMAP Certified
Applicable to
Emergency Management
I wish we would have had this for EMAP accreditation. It would have been 100 times easier.
Brad Gilbert
Director, Union County EMA
Mission Outcomes
Six months in, EM1 has transformed how Union County manages their plans:
Instant Compliance Checks
Compare plans against state templates in seconds, not hours.
Plan Review Time
Hours → Seconds
Proactive Gap Detection
Identify contradictions between plans before incidents expose them.
EMAP Accreditation
100x Easier
Field-Ready Lookup
Query resources from your phone while in the field.
Resource Query
Minutes → 5 sec
1
Situation
Brad Gilbert has emergency management in his blood. His father joined civil defense as a volunteer in the 1960s, and Brad started volunteering at 16. Now, after seventeen years as Union County's Emergency Management Director, he leads an EMAP-accredited, four-person team serving 68,000 residents half an hour north of Columbus. But even a well-resourced program faces a persistent reality. "We're never caught up," Gilbert admits. "I don't care if you're accredited, you still have a thousand projects to do."
Triggering Event
The catastrophic flooding in Kerr County, Texas in July 2025 killed over 130 people. The county had IPAWS alerting capability but failed to use it. Gilbert audited Union County's own readiness and discovered they had limited depth in who was able to use IPAWS.
"That's been my biggest worry. God forbid we really have to send an IPAWS and we weren't fully trained." He needed a way to systematically find gaps across his planning library before an incident exposed them.
2
Discovery & Trust
When Tom Sivak, the former FEMA Region 5 Administrator, joined EM1, Gilbert paid attention. "I got to know Tom pretty well. He's well respected. I thought, this is worth going to bat for." A call with the EM1 team confirmed what he hoped: a tool that could give his small team a running start on the work that never ends. "It just gives you that first 30% or 50% off your plate. Now you're just down to fine tuning."
Why the Closed System Mattered
Union County's plans contain resource inventories, facility locations, and operational protocols. The closed architecture meant Gilbert's team can upload their complete planning library without worrying about data exposure.
"Because it's a closed system, I'm not as nervous about putting something in EM1 versus other open systems. I'm not worried about having to redact everything."
Closed System
Private Knowledge Base
No Model Training
No Redaction Required
3
Execution
Gilbert's team now uses EM1 across three core workflows.
For plan compliance, planner Kathy uses the crosswalk feature to compare municipal plans against county templates in seconds rather than reviewing documents side by side for hours. "She just plugs it in and it says, 'this doesn't match up.' The city of Marysville's EOP doesn't have contradictions with county stuff that we had to spend a lot of time annually looking at.
For after-action work, Gilbert loads exercise plans, meeting notes, and hot wash documents into focus mode and generates structured after-action reports.
And in the field during emergencies, the team queries their uploaded resource book from their phones. "I can do it in 5 seconds on EM1. How many generators I have on-hand, what sizes, and where they are."
Three Workflows, One Platform
Plan Comparison Engine
Crosswalk Builder
After-Action Reports
Mobile-Ready Queries
4
Operational Confidence
Six months in, the compounding benefit is clear: contradictions between plans that once slipped through annual reviews now surface before an event. "Your communication plan says you're going to do this, but your alert & warning plan says you're going to do that. It takes that human error out of it."
Gilbert is candid that EM1 is not a replacement for professional judgment, but he values the second set of eyes. "It makes me feel better that I've got another way to double check our work."
From Reactive to Proactive
Plan contradictions that once surfaced during incidents now get caught during routine reviews. Neighboring emergency management agencies have implemented EM1 after seeing Union County's results.
The team is expanding use into exercise planning, preparedness and response checklist generation, and the EM1 Library for best practices from peer agencies. While Brad and his team plan to conduct more exercises because of their newly expanded capacity, they continue exploring innovative ways to leverage EM1.
2025
EMAP Accreditation
Certification achieved
June 2025
EM1 Deployment
Platform adopted by full team
July 2025
Texas Flooding
Triggering event for IPAWS audit
2026
Exercise Program
Expanded training with EM1
2030
Reaccreditation
Next EMAP milestone
5
Assessment
Union County arrived at EM1 with an accredited program and a clear-eyed view of its own gaps. Six months later, the platform has become embedded in how the team manages plans, runs exercises, and responds in the field.
Gilbert's strongest endorsement is rooted in regret: "I wish we would have had this for EMAP accreditation. It probably would have been 100 times easier."
The Verdict
With reaccreditation on the five-year horizon and an expanded 2026 exercise program planned, Gilbert sees EM1 as essential to his team's trajectory.
"We're still learning," Gilbert says. "But I feel better now than I did six months ago."
