Emergencies test the resilience and adaptability of individuals and organizations, but preparation makes the difference between chaos and control. In this insightful conversation, Meredith Beers, Associate Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response at Tulane University, shares her experience managing diverse and complex scenarios ranging from natural disasters to campus-specific crises. She emphasizes the importance of clear communication, an adaptable all-hazards plan, and structured decision-making to ensure safety and continuity. Her proactive approach to training, collaboration with external agencies, and stakeholder feedback fosters a robust emergency management system, applicable beyond the academic environment. This episode underscores the value of readiness, adaptability, and the human factor in navigating uncertainty effectively.

About the Guest: 

Meredith’s journey into crisis preparedness began as a student at Tulane University when Hurricane Katrina struck. Experiencing one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history profoundly shaped her career path – she realized her calling was to help others prepare for and recover from crises.  These days, she's all about making organizations crisis-ready, but don't expect any dusty emergency manuals that sit on shelves. Her real-world approach brings everyone into the conversation, from mapping out solid game plans to making sure employees know exactly what to do when things go sideways. She's got a knack for breaking down complex situations into clear, actionable updates that keep everyone in the loop when it matters most. Whether she's working with large organizations or community groups, Meredith's message is simple: emergencies don't schedule appointments, so being prepared isn't just a box to check – it's a way of life.

www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-beers

About the Host:

Your host, Maartje van Krieken, brings a wealth of experience from the front lines of business turmoil. With a background in crisis management, managing transformation and complex collaboration, she has successfully guided numerous organizations through their most challenging times. Her unique perspective and practical approach make her the go to First Responder in the arena of business turmoil and crisis.

Podcast Homepage: https://www.thebusinessemergencyroom.com/

https://www.thechaosgamesconsulting.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maartje/

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Maartje van Krieken: Hey, thank you for tuning in again today. I'm glad you're here. We have a very exciting episode today. I'm very excited because we're actually going to talk to somebody whose job it is to work in emergency preparedness and response. My guest today is Meredith bears, and she is the Associate Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response at Tulane University here in New Orleans. And yeah, I'm super glad you're here. You've done 15 or more than 15 years in any type of disaster preparedness and emergency preparedness. So excited to learn all about what it actually means to have a role like that in your organization, and what you do and what we can learn from that to deploy in our organizations as leaders or business owners. So very welcome. Meredith.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Maartje van Krieken: So can we start with just painting the landscape a little bit as an a university and not a small university at all. What does it entail? What is all included? Or what does the director, Associate Director of Emergency Preparedness and Response, all look at?

Yeah, that's a great question. So we're looking at everything from, how do we prepare for a boil water advisory, which we're not unfamiliar with, the New Orleans to power outages from known and unknown sources. You know, a mylar balloon can be our worst enemy some days of the week, and then the known, expected moments of severe thunderstorms that goes power outages to hurricanes, to active shooter situations and kind of everything in between. And so we take an all hazards approach to our emergency planning, and as we write our plans, we're thinking about our many different audiences. So we have employees, which is our faculty and staff, our students, the families of our students, and the majority of our students come from over 500 miles away. So some of our natural hazards that are familiar to us in the Gulf Coast region may not be familiar to them. And then we have affiliates, so our third party vendors that you know are our dining and custodial staffs. And so then we think about, how do we train and educate all of these different groups about how to be prepared in different emergency situations.

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah. So you have people living in campus, you deal with accommodation, but you also have labs and all the chemicals and stuff that come with it. And then you have the normal environment of protest and all the natural it's a huge scope, huh?

It is yes. So we have about 4100 students that live on our Uptown campus, and then the remainder of our student body, which is about 8000 students that live off campus, primarily in the Uptown neighborhood, but definitely throughout the New Orleans area. And then our employees, of course, live all throughout the Greater New Orleans area, and some even a little bit further away, our labs have chemicals. They also have biohazardous components. And then, of course, some of them even have, you know, live animals that are there for research purposes. So we have the gambit of things that we think about and populations that we are concerned with.

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah, wow, yeah. And it's, uh, intriguing to me, because I think as an outsider who doesn't spend significant time at the university, I know it's a huge complex but then when we started talking about this, I started to really, yeah, realize how broad and how wide this truly is. So in what is kind of the size of the people who are full time busy with the subject of emergency preparedness. And for an organization this size,

there are four of us in our office, and we have five student workers. So we are not an insignificant team, but we are certainly mighty. Other universities have similar sizes. Some have one or two people doing this. Others have teams of 10 people. So it kind of depends on the institution, and, you know, their willingness to give resources to a department that, you know, we don't bring funds in, but we spend money really well when there's an emergency, we are very quick to start spending money to help keep everybody safe and protected. We're basically a really small city. You know, we have our own power plant, our own facilities, team, our own police force. So we are, you know, there's most universities have an office like ours with at least one dedicated person, but the really lucky ones have a couple of people like we do. Yeah,

Maartje van Krieken: and if you then think of, does there? Think there's more there that we don't, most of us don't really think about so safe to assume that there is a typical emergency response function to the fires and spills and, yeah, threats, so safety related. And then there's, of course, a communication part that most people are aware of that no doubt exists. This and maybe some legal backing. What are some of the other things that we maybe don't think about in terms of capacity or capability that you develop or have,

but we've got, we take an all hazards approach for our emergency plan, so we come up with kind of one framework plan that can be scaled up or down as needed based on the emergency and it can be used, pretty much for any emergency that we face, whether it's boil water or hurricane, tornado, building collapse, you know, any kind of facilities issue, it all can follow that same basic framework. And we do loosely follow ICs, the incident command structure does have kind of a amended version for higher ed, and we loosely follow what that is to meet our needs, because we have to think about, how does this affect our facilities? How does it affect our academic calendar? So if we're going to recommend that we close the University for a period of time. What does that do for our course offerings? And then how does that affect accreditation? And so there's a little bit of a domino effect when there are emergencies of it's not just one thing, it's 10 things. And so we work with people from around the institution and pretty much every major department. So academics, research facilities, campus operations, which is dining, shuttles and transportation, parking. The Reach is huge, the Housing and Residence Life, Campus Recreation. One of our first questions we close that we know we're going to get from students is, well, will the gym be open? It's not a simple yes or no, because if we're closing there's a reason. And so you know, one of the things we have to consider is, is it safe to bring employees to the university? So does that mean it's safe for an employee to come from their house, wherever they live, get to the university to then staff and work the gym and open it? Do we need to use that facility as a shelter for essential employees if it's a hurricane? So what might seem like it could be a simple yes or no actually has several decision factors behind it, and so learning how to communicate those to the entire university population, to help give them a little bit of context and understanding is really critical and important to what we do. Yeah.

Maartje van Krieken: So what I hear you say is that some of the basic functions that we think of with the cars to emergency preparedness are really more the secondary thing, the first thing is about the structure, the incident command structure, and how things are decided and communicated, and who all needs to be involved in that? And what I hear you say is that there should be one process or one mechanism, but that that can be deployed to different situations. And then once that's in place, there are certain functions that you need to have to be able to execute some of these things. And which is either, yeah, I'd probably either have it in house, or your contract with the local fire department or the local hazmat units, or whatever cover some of these incidents when they occur, and your processes probably define how and when they get called out, or how that's communicated Exactly, yeah, and I'm assuming the interface with emergency services who do this all day, any day, is probably some of the easier interfaces to manage, right? It is.

And you know, on a college campus, get a lot of fire alarms, a lot of bird popcorn, and occasionally, you know, we don't, our dispatchers don't reach the fire department in time to say, Don't come. It's not a fire and so we see our local fire department on a good frequent basis, and so we have a good working relationship with them.

Maartje van Krieken: That's actually a good segue into my next question. We sometimes talked on these episodes about the fact that that if you have any kind of emergency response or procedures that they also need practice right and in the obvious situations where people work with hazards all day, any day, they typically are very well practiced and implemented. But then in other cases where it's maybe more the onshore team that, for instance, in an offshore, onshore situation where people are sitting in an office and only play a role in more exceptional circumstances that sometimes falls apart because it's not practice. So can you talk a little bit about how you keep people trained and actual on what their role is, so that they without going overboard, because they people will still need to do their day jobs, and maybe the likelihood of these events is low.

Yeah, absolutely. You're right. Training and exercising our plans is critical because, well, I know our plans pretty much forward and backward inside out, because I spend most of my time writing and updating them. You know, there's a lot of people who we rely on in emergencies, who. This is not their primary role, and so and in an emergency, what we might be asking you to do your role in the emergency may not be identical to your day to day role. And we might be asking you to report up to the Logistics Section when normally you'd say you're an operations person. And so we do spend a good amount of time training to folks. So we do an annual hurricane tabletop that brings in our entire Emergency Operations Center, all of our primary folks and their backups, and some of our backups even have backups, depending on what the role and position are, because we want everyone to have a clear understanding that, if I'm not here, who's the person who's doing what I would normally do in that situation, and who are they talking to? And what is that structure, that reporting structure look like, and what are the things that they need to be prepared to be asked for that will be maybe part of their day to day, maybe not. And so we do hurricanes. We do spend about six months of the year preparing for hurricane season, going through our plans with different campus partners. And then, you know, hurricanes are a huge part of our life here in New Orleans, you know, it's hurricane season for half the year. And this year we've, you know, we're using that full thing. We're in November, and have had two storms that are in the Gulf, so that's pretty outside of our normal but it's one of the reasons that we spend so much time preparing. And then we go through what are our other plans? And what we've discovered over the years is the plans we think that people want to exercise might not be the ones that they actually feel they need the most help in remembering what they're supposed to do. And so once a year, we do a survey of our campus partners and get their input. What plans do they feel a little bit rusty on, or have we made some changes to that they really want to go a little bit more in depth on? So we get their input on which plans do you really want to exercise and train this year? How do you want to do the training? Do you want it to be in person. Do you want it on Zoom? Do you want a combination of the two and then? Do you want training that's just with your EOC section, or just with your actual department, so just Housing and Residence Life, or just research? Or do you want something that's broader than just your department and is expanding to a larger group, or do you want both? And so having that stakeholder input is really valuable to helping us do what we do, and build those relationships and build trust, and just having all of that as the foundation, because the worst time to meet someone or discover someone doesn't know what they're supposed to do is actually in the emergency. You want there to be that confidence that someone can come to me and say, I know I'm supposed to do this, but who am I supposed to talk to and feel comfortable that I'll be able to help them and not that they're going to get in trouble or something?

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah, I love that. How empowering, right? Because I think we forget that we are actually not all that different. And so yeah, if I have a role to play in emergencies, and you ask me directly to my face, do I feel ready? And if not, what is it that I then need to feel ready? Yeah, I'm totally going to tell you, and I'm going to be able to be quite specific so you then and then, knowing that you'll offer it to me in a tailored manner. I love how effective that probably is. And I think something like that should be employed, maybe broader in the business space, right? What is it that you really need to do your job more effectively? What are some of the hurdles that can take away? And I bet that in emergency response, people just have a high trust that if they then give that feedback, it gets addressed, that maybe they miss if they would be asked that question in a different business context, because there is always a high trust that around emergency preparedness, that people really want and that organizations want to do the right thing, and that it's critical, and that there is Not a lot of space for political maneuvering or BS, right,

exactly. And we want everyone to be successful in emergency, because that is not when we want to fail. That is when we want everybody to feel confident about what they're doing and that we are all working towards the same goal. We might have different areas of the institution that we're most concerned with. And so, you know, everybody's fighting for their piece of the pie, but we're all working towards quick response, rapid recovery, and as little business interruption as possible.

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah, yeah. And I think the definition of success is so much less ambiguous in this situation, and there is no glory in emergency response, right? So that's also different, because even if you are aligned on the definition of success in other aspects of business, there's always also a little bit the the people seeking glory and recognition associated with that, which maybe gets in the way of blindly going for achieve. That success together, regardless of who needs to do what to get there, huh? Yes, yeah. So we talk about both response and preparedness. I always say to people, you cannot be prepared for everything, right? And then, yeah, but training the muscle having more tools in your toolbox in terms of having seen things happen or having heard things happen, and knowing what people did and may or may have worked, that's at least something to go with. And then there's all the the more rigid tools and processes that you have in place. Can you talk a little bit about how doing the preparedness and which parts of the preparedness really help dealing with the situations, having the the flexibility to deal with the situations that you maybe didn't prepare for, or that play out much different than you prepared.

Yeah. So, you know, the hardest thing, I think, in for an emergency manager is to have one emergency and then to have a second one occur while the first one is still ongoing, and that you already have strained resources, and now there is this added X Factor. And you're like, oh god, okay, right now we have this on top of and so while I can sit all day and come up with wacky, crazy out of this world scenarios, like, what if there's a hurricane, and then we have a tornado. Okay, that's pretty standard. And then what if a meteor hits? Well, okay, we don't actually have a meteor plan, but we do have a plan for if there's no electricity, and so if there's a failure of utilities that can be applied, and that's that scalability and multifaceted use that, what is the core issue, and how do we then adapt? So like during Hurricane Ida, okay, as a hurricane, we kind of know what to expect from that, and we know that there's probably going to be a power outage. We might wind up in a boil water advisory. But with Hurricane Ida, we got the added bonus of the utility had one of the Transformers fall into the Mississippi River. And so what, you know, a normal power outage from a hurricane is, you know, couple days, maybe a couple weeks, depending on the extent of the damage, that was going to be a month and a half, like, oh, okay, that really changes. How do we function? And so we started looking at our failure of utilities plan, we started looking at, how long can we sustain the students that were still on campus, and is that really viable for life safety? Because safety is the number one priority in any emergency for your people. And we quickly decided, nope. This isn't going to work. And so we flipped our evacuation plan, which had been written with the intent of being used before Hurricane and used it or after a hurricane. And is that ideal? No, but because it's flexible, we could do it and then we just had the core essential personnel that help protect our property and get our assets back up and functioning to care for and have on our campuses, and by removing our students and sending them with some with a different group of essential personnel to another city where they could then function, be safe, go on to their homes or other cities, if they so chose, because we were going to be closed for a little bit of Time, all of those things kind of help by just looking at, what are the core needs, what are those core basic things, and what are the essentials? And then from there, once you can address those, then the rest kind of falls into place. And that's where having a business continuity plan is so important. Where in a business continuity plan, you're really looking at what are the essential things that help me meet my mission? And so our departments, you know, from the English Department all the way up to the institution as a whole, have plans to identify and address what are those three to five, four things that you must do to keep functioning? Everything else is gravy. But what do you need to do those things? And how long can you be down without them before you're really impacted?

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah. So what I'm hearing you say is you have, if you end up in a situation that was that's not planned for, but you have plans for other situations you start with, you use maybe a few of them, and there may be somewhat overlapping in subject, but you can use them as checklist and say, Okay, this part actually applies here, because this plan actually does identify who is business critical and which categories people fall in, and how many people are in there, and how we can communicate them. And we can use that here, and then we'll use this piece of that plan, and you cobble it together, yeah,

and sometimes you wind up writing something on the fly as you go, but because you have that core foundation of understanding how your institution work, how your plans work, and then just knowing your organization and the resources that you have, it can be done.

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah. So can we I also would like to talk about business school TV for a bit before we get to that. Can you talk a little bit about. About how crucial it had it is to have clarity around your decision making structure in these situations. If decision making is a hot topic in general, in business continuity and in the business emergency room, but even more so in emergency response, right?

Yes, it's you have to know. And this goes back to training, you have to know who is the ultimate decision maker. And for us, part of that is it's not me. Sometimes I wish it were me. A lot of the times, I'm glad I just get to give a recommendation. But that for us, it's knowing what information is going to help our decision maker, make an actual informed decision. And the hard part with emergencies is you don't have the full picture, necessarily. You have the information you have at that moment in time, and so you have to make the best decision that you can with that sometimes limited information. Hindsight is 2020, like, that's that's the way that one works. And sometimes you look back and you're like, Wolf should have made a different choice there. But you know, as long as you can stand by the decision that was made because you provided, as from our office, the emergency managers, we provide the best information, the most information as we can to the decision maker, and it's one, it's not, you know, we don't have to go through eight different people who are all making decisions. Everybody is compiling information for one person who then will talk to advisors. But by having that single point and not, you know, I talked to this person over here, and they said yes, and this person over here said no, and now we're at a standoff that creates more chaos and in an emergency, time isn't necessarily always on your side. Often you do need to make faster decisions. And again, that's where that training comes in, of helping get the decision maker used to, you know, not having the perfect amount of data that we would love to give. And, you know, I keep a magic eight ball in my office, and occasionally I'll ask it a question, just to see, you know, is this going to last a long time? And usually it says, Ask again later, which, okay, but I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't tell you what the outcome is going to be. You know, is the tornado actually going to hit us, or is it going to be across the river and miss us? But I still need to send that emergency alert out, because what if it does come right next to us? As the tornado going to be small, or is it going to be big? Is a hurricane going to hit us? Is the boil water advisory going to last the typical, you know, 24 to 36 hours are we looking at a week? You know, I wish I had a crystal ball. I would be doing very well financially. I think if I did, we'd have my services in high demand. But this is where those partnerships with the external agencies, you know, we talk to sewage and water board. We have a good relationship with their emergency manager. We talk with the city, gosh, every week, just to have those relationships that we can all be talking and sharing information and making sure that we aren't getting our information from a vacuum, so that when we provide that to our decision maker, you know he's going to say, what's another university doing? What's the city doing? We have all of that.

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah. And so there's, I love a lot, and what you say, because what I'm hearing, is exactly what we talk about in decision quality, right? The decision quality is about making the best decision you can make in the moment with the information you have. And yeah, you say, in a in an emergency situation, you feel that pressure and you have to, I often advocate that in business, sometimes you should also force yourself to make that decision, because actually trying to get more or better information is going to be such a long trajectory that it becomes a non decision, because you're pushing out a decision. And there's other things not happening because you think that more or better information is gonna make you more right, whilst there is an opportunity to make a decision with a limited time frame, right? So, for instance, in your boil water advisory, well, then the decision maybe is, we're making this decision now, assuming it's the normal duration, and then, yeah, we might need to make a different decision 24 hours from now, if it turns out that this is so major that is likely going to be more days, and then we'll make a progressively different decision. And I like the singularity in in emergency response of a single decision maker, because, in reality, is not truly a single decision maker, right? Because all the people who collect that information are very experienced in what it is that they need to present to a decision maker what's relevant and making. And so the decision maker is is going to do what the advice suggests, because what you're advising them is probably not, these are 17 options, right? It's like this is the recommended path. And so then decision making for. Functions more as the the reasoning that we talk about in decision quality. Can you talk through the logic of what you're advising for somebody else to say, Yeah, that makes sense. So yes, I will go with your recommendation, right? It's the sanity test of of what's being presented to them. Exactly. Yeah.

And, you know, with, you know, like any industry, there's always turnover of people, and that's why you can't train once and be like, Okay, we did it once. That was great, because what if you have a new decision maker? What if you know your head of facilities leaves? What if you have a new head of housing? Like all of these people need to be brought up to speed. You need to earn that trust and learn how they work and how do they like to receive information? How do they like to present information? Because that all blends together for that ultimate teamwork of getting through the emergency.

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah, lots of questions, but I want to close with one question so people will listen that work in in very different types of organizations, in different sizes and often also growing fast, right? So there's definitely some that have a certain level of emergency preparedness in house, but many who at some point should be looking at developing that. So can you give us some of the the main two or three things that you think if you if you get started out on shaping and forming something in your business about emergency preparedness and response, what are some of the main backbones to look at, and is there some kind of idea around size or complexity of your organization when this becomes really relevant, or does it? Is it universal, and everybody should be doing something?

I think everybody should be doing something for your everything from your house all the way to your business, that this is something that, you know, I hope that is we're talking to our students, our faculty, our staff, about emergency preparedness at school. So, you know, we cancel classes. What does that mean? That they're also taking that to their homes and preparing themselves personally. That you know that I want everyone to have a small, fireproof, waterproof safe that they keep all of their important documents in, that you know, if there's a flood or you're in a pipe burst at your home or apartment complex, that you don't lose your you know, your social security card, your earth license, your marriage certificates, any of those things that you have, that stuff, if there's, God forbid, a fire, that you don't lose that documentation, because it's already somewhere that's easy to grab, it's going to be preserved. So I think there is no such thing as an organization too small to be prepared, is you look at organizations some critical things that I think you need. I love an all hazards plan. It's kind of all encompassing. It is flexible, scalable, adaptable. Kind of works for everything. A crisis communications plan. So my family, I live in New Orleans, the rest of my family is in Texas, and so if there's an emergency where cell towers might be overloaded, our plan is not to text each other at the top of the hour, because that's very common time. We text at an odd time within the hour, and that's just kind of what we know everybody's going to check in around that time. You know, text messaging we always go with instead of trying to call and so you know that's a personal crisis communications plan, but your business also needs one. How are you talking with your employees, with your customers, your stakeholders, you know your investors, whomever your stakeholders may be. And then a continuity plan. So how long can you not be functioning before it's a problem? And what are those critical key components are essential functions that make you able to do what you do. You know, some of our academic departments will say that one of their key functions is teaching. Okay, yes, this is the university that is a key function. But can you go for three days without teaching and it be okay. Technology has really evolved. Can you have an asynchronous course posted somewhere that you know still lets you get those contact hours, but doesn't require you to be face to face with your students? So having those backup plans in place is really important. And you know, if you've ever written a plan, everybody, nobody's written plan until they have there's always a first. And FEMA has some really great resources that I love, that you can use for your personal life and your business life.

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah, like a coat rack, and you can take it into your business. Okay, if this is the label that FEMA puts on it, what's that called in our business? Or who, where? Where does it sit? Or who is this equivalent position, and it's scalable, right? Yes, yes, exactly. So well. Meredith, I love this conversation, and we could talk lots more about it, but I'm so happy that we actually dissected a little bit through emergency preparedness here on the podcast. And yeah, the main takeaway that I'm here. Is that you should have a base structure in place as to how you tackle these, tackle events the unexpected, right? And that it's there's some clarity on on roles and responsibilities in there, clarity on who's decision maker, and yeah, as you're larger than than they can be defined for specific situations that have at least a generic role, including that includes the simple stuff of, indeed, how you communicate. Because I remember, I inherited a team to interim manage weeks before Katrina and I was based out of Europe. They were half year in the US, and then, for legal reasons in the systems, they cannot report to you, so I didn't have access yet to their emergency information. And then, of course, they all evacuated. And then it's like, well, you're their manager. Is everybody safe? I'm like, How weird? Where do you start? Maybe, yeah, and it's not actually funny, it's awful, right? And yes, stress, yeah, me being their intern manager, I'm also the last who they're thinking about. And there was actually other people who they directly work within the organization, who had checked in with, and then it got all absorbed, and it was fine, but in itself, it's such a simple thing. It's like, yeah, I don't, I don't have contact details. I know, don't know where people went to, and then cell phones weren't so widespread, so having a simple backup solution on how communications can work, or a second channel, these are little things that don't take 100 years to prepare and agree and and review on an annual basis. Right? It can be a nice afternoon with some tomb building and board game and a little so thank you for all your wisdom. If people are hearing you today and they want to know more about what you do or connect with you professionally and are interested in all that. can they reach out to you? What do they do?

I can be found on LinkedIn, and would love to connect with people who want to

Maartje van Krieken: learn more. Great. That's very nice and generous of you, because, yeah, I'm sure there's a as a career professional in this space, there is looks that people can learn from you. So before we close out today's episode, do you have a final parting wisdom for us? What is it you do in chaos or like in chaos?

I have two quotes that come to mind when things are not going as smoothly or the way I'd like. The first one is, I will not be beat by defeat. And the second is, what would Dolly Parton do?

Maartje van Krieken: I love the second one, but yes, the first one is very Yeah, right. And I think it's so true in emergencies, yeah, sitting down and doing nothing is not an option, right? So, yes, yeah. So I'm glad that's an important quote to you. Is an emergency preparedness director, so thank you again. Meredith, thank you for tuning in. I hope to see or hear you all here in the next episode. And yeah, thank you.

Thank you.