The Initial Report of the Disaster Preparedness Summit can be downloaded here.

About the Summit:

Johnson County Emergency Management and Homeland Security invited the public safety community and affiliated professionals in Johnson County to an all day Disaster Preparedness Summit on April 23rd, 2009. The purpose of the Summit was to  better define the appropriate level of disaster preparedness in Johnson County, identify the gaps and challenges in getting us to the desired level, and discover potential solutions for bridging the gap.

While emergency managers and public safety officials have a long history of working collaboratively to enhance Johnson County’s level of preparedness, much of this work is focused on specific programs, grants, improvement areas, or projects.  As such, opportunities to discuss and/or assess disaster preparedness holistically (for Johnson County) are rare. The first half of the Disaster Summit provided an opportunity for this as it was devoted to a high-level open discussion regarding disaster preparedness in Johnson County.

The second half of the Disaster Summit was focused on performing a comprehensive capability assessment for the county. Performing a local capabilities assessment is an essential component to managing risk effectively.  Recently, the State of Kansas has invested in the creation of a capability assessment tool that is to be used in each of the Homeland Security Regions. To accomplish this, each of the counties in the KC Metro Region (Johnson, Leavenworth, & Wyandotte) performed a county-specific capability assessment in this session.

To ensure the accuracy and completeness of the work performed at the Disaster Summit,  Chief/Director level representatives as well as an operations-focused  representatives from each public safety organization in Johnson County were invited to attend for the entire day. However, Chief/Director level participation was most important in the first half of the summit (for the open discussion from 8:30am to 11:30am) and participation from operations-focused individuals was most important in the afternoon session (for the capabilities assessment from 12:30pm to 4:30pm). There was a working lunch from 11:30am to 12:30pm. 

If you have questions regarding the Disaster Preparedness Summit, please contact Dan Robeson at 913-715-1013 or drobeson@jocogov.org.