Patrick Sheehan On Tennessee Emergency Management Agency
Patrick Sheehan, Director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, joins us for a conversation that pulls back the curtain on one of the most important jobs in state government, and one most people rarely think about until something goes wrong. Patrick explains what emergency management actually looks like day to day, why most of the work is unglamorous planning and relationship building, and how Tennessee prepares for everything from flooding and tornadoes to public health crises and major infrastructure failures. We talk about the reality behind disaster declarations, how extreme weather is changing, and why the most dangerous misconception is believing that government programs are designed to make people whole after catastrophe.
Our episode with TEMA's Patrick Sheehan was recorded prior to Winter Storm Fern, but the information is relevant for both this storm and events Tennessee will face in the future. Please check TEMA's website for support and resources related to the storm.
About Patrick Sheehan
Patrick Sheehan is the Director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, where he leads statewide disaster preparedness, response, and long term recovery efforts. In a role that demands both calm leadership and relentless coordination, Patrick works with local governments, first responders, nonprofit partners, and state agencies to help Tennesseans navigate everything from severe weather and flooding to public health emergencies and major infrastructure disruptions.
Patrick’s path into emergency management was not a straight line. After time in the Army Reserve, he spent years working inside his family’s small businesses, including gas stations and dry cleaners, where the pressure of payroll, turnover, and daily operations gave him a firsthand understanding of what stability really means for families and communities. Those experiences, paired with a desire to serve, eventually led him into emergency management more than two decades ago.
Over the course of his career, Patrick has helped lead disaster planning and response across multiple states and administrations, with a consistent focus on the same core idea: systems are imperfect, plans are never complete, and relationships are what hold communities together when reality does not follow the script.
Leadership & Community Impact
Patrick’s approach to emergency management is grounded in both structure and adaptability. He believes preparedness is not just about writing plans, but about building the trust and coordination required to respond when the unexpected happens. His work reflects a belief that Tennessee’s strength is not only in response, but in the everyday civic engagement that makes communities more resilient before disaster strikes.
Resources
Tennessee Emergency Management Agency (TEMA)
Appalachia Service Project
Habitat for Humanity
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Spencer: [00:00:00] Welcome to Signature Required. It is intended for Tennesseans by Tennesseans, the heart of a Tennesseean. The volunteer state is serve, and we do so largely without self-promotion.
Carli: And these are genuine people that get up every day and want to make art or want to educate the nations, or want to have a heart of love in a way that makes a difference.
Spencer: Learn from 50 years of experience. Take a nugget away and then go share it with a friend, Patrick Sheen. Director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, welcome to Signature Required. Thanks so much. I'm so excited to be here. Not many people know the specifics of what you do, but you have an incredible array of emergencies and disasters that you've responded to over your career.
Like people can kind of guess, [00:01:00] all right, probably when stuff goes wrong. Patrick's the guy that gets the phone call, but you've dealt with know Ebola, drinking water emergencies bombs, I mean, all sorts of stuff. I'm excited to hear about all the different things that you cover, but when you think about.
What you do, how do you describe it to people when someone says, what do you do every day?
Patrick: Yeah. A lot of it's mundane, administrative and boring, right? So when you think about identifying what hazards are trying to put some likelihood or percentage around which, what should be the most important thing it's working on those things and then having difficult conversations with partners and community leaders around things that they can do to improve their preparedness and their safety.
And then really working with partner agencies, first, responsible organizations and associations for. Things like water and wastewater treatment and waste removal and solid waste authorities to be ready for [00:02:00] disasters. And because they tend to generate lots of debris and they require teamwork.
And if you're building relationships after right, of boom as we say, or after the disaster, it's too late,
Carli: right. Of boom. I like that. I imagine your job is 90% mundane and then 10% panic. Is that roughly the percentage there? I wouldn't say
Patrick: panic, but certainly it has a sense of urgency, right?
So where we're really working to coordinate immediate response with partners, , and it's team is pretty small. My agency's pretty small, so we're working. Through other organizations. We're working with local partners, first response organizations, again, fire departments, police departments, the highway patrol our friends of the TBI, depending on what the circumstances are.
The National Guard is a tremendous force provider in the state of Tennessee and in most states. So working through them and with them to respond to things that we have mostly already planned for. Though things unfold in, in ways that are very unexpected all the time. But yeah, so those are the kinds of things we're working on.
And I think most [00:03:00] people when they step back they think, oh yeah, someone would have to be doing that. because that would be the prudent thing for government to be doing. And they just. Don't necessarily tag it to a TEMA or a state emergency management agency.
Carli: You're the they when they're like, they'll take care of it.
Yeah. You're the they then. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Okay.
Spencer: I feel like it's probably 99% boredom followed by 1% terror in some way. Like you spend a lot of time getting ready. Yes. But on average, there's like four federally declared disasters in Tennessee per year. Does that sound right? Pretty
Patrick: close over my nine plus years here.
That's about, that's getting close to the average. Yeah. For context though, in the 1980s, there were three federal major disaster declarations in the state of Tennessee. So we're averaging now in a given year, plus or minus what we experienced in a decade, in the 1980s. So do
Spencer: you feel like that's because the standards [00:04:00] of what.
No. Has changed or is it truly that we're just experiencing? I mean, what would that be? 10 times more disasters?
Patrick: Yeah. So it, I think it's a confluence of things, right? So some, we have more population in the state, so when a tornado went through or a flood went through some other place before there weren't people there.
Now we have neighborhoods or industrial parks that weren't there before. So I think that's part of it. Certainly we see an increase in intense weather, and so we're having drier dry. So droughts are more acute. They've settled more quickly. And flooding and rainfall is heavier. So we have plumal or aerial flooding really quickly.
In addition to the river and stream flooding that has always existed here.
It was the 1990s, so it was peace time. The military was drawing down in size. And I went with, who had the biggest signing bonus for an MOS, and that happened to be NBC, and now we would call it seaburn.
Chemical biological, radiological nuclear and explosive. And went to an army [00:05:00] reserve unit in the state of Georgia and, those kind of skills, whether, how to do plume modeling. And at that point it was grease pencil on Ace. Overlay on a map to look and how you could calculate certain things using wind speed.
And then I had planned on having a career as an army officer like my dad had. And he got very sick my senior year. And so I didn't finish my degree on program. And then I found myself unexpectedly being a civilian. Over the years, my mother's side of the family who's Korean had immigrated to the United States of America.
And, we had very stereotypical immigrant Korean businesses in the family around metro Atlanta. So we had dry cleaners and gas stations. And when my life plans were disrupted, I went to go work in my family's businesses around gas stations and, the pressure of making payroll, having turnover employees on an acute level, because it really matters at that small business level, kind of sharpens something in me.
And, and my mother's a barber still to this day. She still is a barbershop. I grew up in a small business family and just [00:06:00] kind of acutely aware of, small changes in a business environment really. Make a tremendous impact on the household and we felt that acutely and the same thing as we were getting into gas stations and dry cleaners.
But those things have hazardous materials, I was able to write some policy and procedure manuals so that we could kinda have a standard process across our different gas stations and had a handle when someone drove off with the handle, the dispensing handle still in their car.
because we were paying a vendor to do it and it was costing us a couple hundred dollars a pop. And like, we can do this for sunk cost of what we're already paying staff or do it ourselves. Writing those manuals, doing silly little video around how to reattach the breakaway things and.
Those, and then also working 90 hours a week, so when you work for family, you essentially are an indentured servant in many ways. The expectation is that you work a lot. And my, my expectation around what was possible for a human being to work is probably a little different, was set a little different then even from from my earlier upbringing.[00:07:00]
And then I fell in love and my future wife moved to Ohio. And I ended up taking some civil service exams just to find a job that was closer and happened to be at the Ohio Emergency Management Agency. And 23 years ago, I guess, I went to go almost 23 years ago, I went to go work for the Ohio Emergency Management Agency.
Really in serendipity, because one of the things I remembered in 1997 in one of my business management classes was studying intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the impact of morale and organizations on how high performing they are. We, there was a case study that just come out about fema, and no one will believe this at the time, but in 1997, FEMA had the highest public perception of any federal agency.
Really? Yeah. Wow. Any, and had the highest morale of any federal agency. So it was a smaller organization then rebuilt after Hurricane Andrew, and, people in my profession attribute that a little bit to James Lee Witt, who was the FEMA director at the time, had been the Arkansas Director of Emergency Management [00:08:00] under his, the same boss.
Right. President Clinton had been the governor of Arkansas, and he brought his state emergency management director with him, who had a ha a habit of collaborating with the, with partners in the state and had experience and brought that experience to, to bear.
Spencer: They were seen as the heroes.
Patrick: Yeah. And after Hurricane Andrew. FEMA was not underperformed in many ways. Sometimes the talking points take on reality become replace reality. So they were perceived as being very slow. And you can make an argument that the Andrew response or lack of response cost.
George Herbert Walker Bush reelection. Yeah. because they didn't win Florida. Which would've been a pretty significant, studying those things and then getting to work at the Ohio Emergency Management Agency for 13 years. I had incredible mentors in Dale Shipley, who was the director when I was hired there.
And and then Nancy Dani, who was the director for about 10 of the years that I was there. And she's my mentor and was un was very willing to have hard conversations with me around things she thought I was doing [00:09:00] poorly. And, I was very junior and rose through the organization for a number of years and worked with some just tremendously good people.
And a couple of different gubernatorial administrations there and got experience with a broad range of things and the importance of just being, of leaning in right. And, in Emergency Operations Center, you guys have seen like mission control. Things like you pull people together to solve problems, but you don't pull just willy-nilly, throw people into a room and it works.
So in Ohio over time, we kind of figured out who was good, who we probably needed a different representative for organizations for, and so we were able to improve that team. In Tennessee, they figured out a long time ago how to improve that. They make the commissioners responsible for working with the team of director to assign people to represent their organizations or cer certain subjects.
And then we have training requirements for them. And so Tennessee figured this out, four decades ago and really kind of sets apart. But serendipitously is how I kind of [00:10:00] got into this. Right. So I kind of trying to loop back to the the question is, I had some experiences that I was able to leverage from either the Army Reserve or my family's small business.
My original plan to become an army officer and have a career there getting derailed. Those things kind of, put me in a place where I could continue to serve. And that was another thing is I was working for my family's business. Like I knew I didn't want to keep running gas stations and rental properties and convenience stores and dry cleaners.
I wanted to find some way to serve and prayed for discernment around what my vocation would be given that my life plans had were so drastically different. And was very fortunate to get hired by some great people and get to work there for a number of years before being recruited to come down here.
Nine and a half years ago.
Spencer: Patrick, one of your stories hit me right between the eyes when you talked about the breakaway at the gas station, that pump. I have done that once in my life, and I'm telling you, [00:11:00] wait, have
Carli: you really? I have. You don't know this.
Spencer: It happens every day. I mean, I was so embarrassed.
I, I had a million things on my mind and I just, the last thing I just need to fill up and go, and I did. I filled up and went and, I made it like three feet. I obviously heard it break away and all the rest, and when I had to walk inside and acknowledge that I had pulled it, they were like, just leave it on the ground.
And so I went back out to my truck, I pulled it outta my truck and I left it on the ground and I was like, I just have had enough of this day. So that was just like, it's funny to me because as small business owners like. Carli and I in the logistics space deal with the craziest stories imaginable, right?
I mean, we've had delivery drivers that have done the craziest things that, that you could ever come up with. It does make you a good storyteller. Like that's one good thing that being small business owners really does, is you get to tell story after [00:12:00] story. But I really appreciate that root in, in your story, which is that entrepreneurial backing because I tend to think right or wrong that once you get into a level of government or military deployment, there isn't a lot of freelancing.
Yeah. There's not a lot of entrepreneurial creativity or energy. So did you appreciate that structure? Or was it something that it took a while to mold you into a place where that was something that felt fulfilling? Because I, I could kind of, I could make a case either way, like culturally, with your background, your experience in small business, like I'm interested to to see what you think about that.
Patrick: I think you need both. You need the structure and then if it's not working, you need the freedom of thought to vary from it. Right. So do you have both those now? I think so. [00:13:00] I, gosh, I hope so. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I spent years at the Ohio Emergency Management Agency as a planner and then as the manager of planners and working on emergency preparedness plans and helping our counties write plans and improve their plans and focus on the kinds of things that they could do.
But one of the things I noted. Probably 16 or 17 years ago was that every plan I wrote, no matter how good it was, missed some thing of reality. So it's like a model, right? So it's like a small scale construction model of what re structure might look like. In the same way, a plan is a theoretical framework around how the world will unfold.
And it's always going to be incomplete. Something will be missing. And so you need to be able to vary it. You need to be able to play jazz a little bit or call an audible and help make sure that you're doing the thing that actually faces the situation that you're actually facing, rather than what you thought you were gonna be facing.
And you need to be able to do both. And the rigors of planning, the rigors of pulling people together and doing things together helps you [00:14:00] forge strong relationships. because I do think every system will fail in some way, shape, or form. It'll underperform. And if you have built. Good sinewy relationships that with people that where they can trust you and depend on you, and likewise, you can trust and depend on them, you can overcome an imperfect plan or a plan that, might be not at all what you thought it was gonna be and or not facing a situation that not at all that unfolding in a very different way.
Right? Having relationships, investing in those where you know, each other's strengths and weaknesses and what you can depend on and what you can't really helps us in our organization meet the needs of Tennesseans.
Carli: I'm curious, of course there's a plan, of course. Counties have plans and you write this, but this isn't my business.
Right. I don't have background, so I've never actually thought about it. So when you're planning, do you have, is it just natural disasters or chemical or do you sit down and [00:15:00] think county by county if there's a tornado X, if there's a hurricane y if there is a pandemic Z. Yeah. Or is it holistic? Is it individual?
How does that even work? because I think I will go to sleep feeling a little bit better tonight knowing that my county has a plan for all of this.
Patrick: Yeah. So we call it all hazards. The all hazards taxon taxonomy because when you have, it's like, for an athlete, like they do general physical conditioning and general physical preparedness.
Being strong in a clean has no play over or cleaning jerk.
Carli: So it's like the core work. Yeah. Yes. Okay. And
Patrick: It allow, it enables you to do other things, right? So we do all hazards planning. We try to figure out what our capabilities are, but then we look at what our hazards of prime concern are.
What are the things that are most likely going to drive an activation? And then what are the con the varying consequences? Like some events are very low probability, but the cons, the potential consequences and cascading consequences of them are really high. We're going to have flooding.
That is a high probability, high [00:16:00] consequence of it does both kills more people than anything but heat in the United States of America. In terms of the hazards you can face it does more economic damage and infrastructure damage than any other hazard consistently, year in, year out. So flooding for us and across the United States of America, that with no exceptions, is the number one hazard we face.
And that is, that should shape how we. Approach development. It should shape at the community level. It's their decisions, right? It should shape how we invest in different capabilities. So having boats, having people that are trained on doing water rescue or technical rescues in our communities, it should shape those things and inform those things.
And it should shape what the plans look like for doing damage assessments afterwards and ensuring the safety of people that are going out there. And then for me, like I am, I chair the central US Earthquake Consortium, which is focused around the New Madrid seismic zone, which if you, there's one natural lake in a state of Tennessee.
Did you guys know that?
Spencer: No. No.
Patrick: One Natural lake, every other lake that we have in this state, every other large impoundment is manmade [00:17:00] either TVA or US Army Corps of Engineer. The one natural lake we have here is Realfoot Lake. It's in northwest Tennessee, between Lake and Obion counties, and it did not exist in 1811, and it was formed by earthquakes, a series of powerful.
Earth changing earthquakes 1811 and 1812. And so I worry about earthquakes as the chairman of the EC board of directors, which is, it's the states around there realizing that it's not just gonna be one of us, it's gonna be all of us. And, James Lee Witt and Lacey Suiter, who's one of my predecessors and is the godfather of many things that we do in emergency management.
Really they put together this organization so that we can work on the interstate, the what are the things that we need to do together, where are the things we're gonna be competing on, and can we take this while we have the luxury of time to adjudicate who's going to get what and when while we have the luxury of time while we're not trying to save, to do the urgent life saving work.
Carli: So floods are for sure. Yeah. Earthquake you're saying might happen, will happen at some point. [00:18:00] It will happen at some point. Maybe not imminently, but at some point. But the potential catastrophe when it does happen is super high. So that's one of those examples. Yes. Okay.
Spencer: When you think about your career, I think some stories would help bring it to light, some.
And so maybe it's your first one, maybe it's a more recent one. But as you think back on something that helps demonstrate some of the scope, some of the planning things that you say we got it right and maybe got it wrong, what's something that comes to mind?
Patrick: Oh gosh. There's, I have a whole lot of Helene stories I could tell and a whole lot of COVID stories probably.
And March of 2020 tornado stories, I'll start with the water system one. You and I before this got started, talked a little bit about the water crisis in Toledo, Ohio, and. The director of Ohio's Environmental Protection Agency, who had been in the governor's office before when he newly [00:19:00] got there, came over to meet with me and the director and some other folks talk about his concerns around Toledo's Water System, which is a works progress administration project from the 1930s.
And, they had significant concrete problems in their roofing and and no water storage. So everything that they take in is real time from Lake Erie with a water intake about a mile out. So we were gonna do an exercise with them. And so I went up there with some of my teammates and some of the, our local partners from Lucas County, Ohio and the City of Toledo Fire and Rescue Department and I think some, someone from the mayor's office probably.
And so we went and we toured around. We kicked around with different exercise scenarios might look like and. Then we had a tremendous algal bloom blue-green algae cyanobacteria, and it releases microcystin toxin. And because of the real time draw of the water, like there was very little contact time between carbon as water treatment plants, comes in, it goes into a flocking [00:20:00] basin and where things coagulate and settle out so that you have less turbidity in the, in your water, and then it goes through and gets chlorinated and fluoride gets added and things like that.
But because we had gone through and done preparation to do an exercise with them when they had the cyanobacteria, the blue-green algae blooms, miles around their water intakes. We were ready readier than we would've been to be able to respond to that crisis. And so the Governor of Ohio declared a state of emergency.
We provided water. We moved reverse osmosis, water purification units there. We worked with we had some non-profit organizations that had rope use is what we call 'em as well. And so they moved up there and the Fire Chiefs Association helped us mobilize their mutual aid system to be able to move water to different places.
And then we worked with Kroger and other large companies, Walmart among others, to, make bottled water available to folks who we thought needed water that was gonna be safe to drink and consume. And we learned a lot about what we [00:21:00] didn't know, and thank God we were doing an exercise.
And that's something else is like a lot of times when we're sitting down we talked about Ebola as well, and we did a tabletop exercise for Ebola and then the next day we had a nurse from Texas who had treated an Ebola patient, pop hot for Ebola and Oh my gosh. So wait. That's
Carli: true. You did it one day and then it happened, like, oh, yes.
Yeah.
Patrick: It may have been two days, but it was, we did a tabletop exercise with the senior most leaders from across the enterprise of state government there and the governor's office. And then we spent the next two weeks or so running 24 hours out of our emergency operation center trying to figure out what the implications were for.
In that instance Ohio,
Spencer: Patrick, do you think you should publicize what tabletop exercises you do from here forward so that way people can be a little more prepared for
Patrick: Yeah, if you have a tabletop exercise and it
Carli: happens in 48 hours, we all yeah,
Patrick: we, yeah. We do them a lot. We do a lot of exercises.
Like our team, we have, we focused a lot here in the last couple years on helping build some regional teams. And so we did some incident management team [00:22:00] exercises two weeks ago around varying scenarios. So we're always trying to get better. And
Carli: has it ever actually occurred within 48 hours like it did with Ebola, or was that just a special level of work?
I
Patrick: think the water. I don't wanna say. Yeah, I don't know. It, there's been, there's a, there seems like there's a tendency. We do exercises around scenarios all the time that don't, that, that don't pan out like that. It just, we were worried about Ebola because of the things that were happening in other places in America at the time.
And the governor's office directed us to do it and so we did it.
Carli: I'm glad you did.
Spencer: So the obligatory question that probably everybody wants to ask you, but nobody actually asks you because it's not professional too, but like, what are you most worried about? Like when you think about the things you've talked about, what mo what is most deadly and that's what, and flooding, is there some type of disaster or some occurrence where despite the preparation you're just behind?
Is there something that you think about [00:23:00] related to that?
Patrick: I mean, I have a general dreads too strong a word, but. We each, even as citizens, have a, have responsibilities in disasters. And some of that is, participating in your community. And so government is not the answer to everything.
And so if you're looking for us to provide everything, that is not the system we have in the United States of America. And the expectation seems to be sometimes that we're going to make people whole after disaster, but being well insured and being ready to the extent that you can be in our own households is important as well.
And we all in, myself included, think that disasters happen or behave like disasters don't happen to us. Like they only happen to other people. And so we don't do, no one does enough to prepare ourselves and that has me concerned and none of our disaster aid programs in the United States of America are designed to make people whole.
They're designed [00:24:00] to stabilize communities, stabilize households so that the suffering stops, but they're not a replacement for insurance. They're not a replacement for good financial planning on your own behalf and cannot substitute for it. Our laws don't call for it. The wills of the Generals General Assembly or the United States and Congress don't call for it when you look at the statutes that are enacted.
So there are limits to what aid can be given under statute, under law, and we'll work tremendously with nonprofit partners to try to help shore up and get even more aid and work with disaster philanthropists to help get more. But it still won't make people whole. So you have to act like it's going to happen to you at least a little bit and have your financial documents in place, have your know where your documents are.
People don't do enough around that. And there's things that we just can't do for people. And that they have to do for themselves.
Carli: Did I read that less than 1% of Tennesseans have flood insurance?
Patrick: Yeah. [00:25:00] And yeah. Yes. You know that we talk about flood insurance too. The way we talk about flood plains is, the 1% flood or the a hundred year flood.
And if someone has a federally backed mortgage, they have to have a flood insurance policy if they're in the floodplain. So those structures, by and large are insured. But if someone doesn't have a federally backed mortgage note, they don't. If someone doesn't have, if they've, they tend, when they pay their structures off to stop also paying for flood insurance.
because the reason you have the flood insurance when you have a mortgage is the lender wants to make sure they're gonna be made whole and to shore up their lending. Right. And so many people, when they pay their note off, also stopped paying for their flood insurance. They should probably not do that.
And one of the things I wanna point out too is like when you look at, we have good statistics now, going back to the start of the flood insurance program, national Flood Insurance Program in [00:26:00] 1963, I think it's 1963. If you have, if you live in the floodplain, there is a 27% chance that in over the course of that 30 year note, you're going to file a claim for flood damage.
And most people don't realize that they hear the 1% or they hear the a hundred year and they, I've only been here 20 years, so it'll be 80 years. That's not how probabilities work. And so if you live in a floodplain and you have a federally backed note, the statistics, the empirical data shows us that there's a 27% chance that you're going to file a claim over the life of that note.
And about flood insurance too. So communities opt in to part, participate in the National Flood Insurance program and there's. There's a way to reduce your premiums through what's called the community rating system. And so jurisdictions can take actions around zoning and inspections and enforcement that can really drive down the cost of flood insurance and [00:27:00] folks should pay more attention to that to community leaders.
We're making an emphasis at TEMA to highlight what mayors and alderman can do to help reduce premium burden to Tennesseans.
Carli: Well, and to your point, you always think it's gonna happen to someone else.
My brother and sister-in-law were horribly impacted by Hurricane Helene and there are still impacts in their community right now.
And tell me a little bit about what you saw during that disaster. because I think that's still so fresh of mind for so many of us.
Patrick: Yeah. So I mean, the first thing to note is almost all of the flooding damage that occurred in Tennessee was from rainfall that fell in North Carolina, right? So we had folks who really didn't experience much rainfall, that saw tremendous biblical kind of flooding.
And so paying attention to the headwaters of wherever you live is really important as well. I spent a lot of that week ahead of Helene making landfall [00:28:00] on talking, giving interviews, asking folks to pay attention and be ready to evacuate. And sadly, we had a need to evacuate lots of places.
I really appreciate Unicor and Washington Counties did a lot to get people out of some communities they knew to flood, to be prone to flooding out of the way ahead of time. So I think that between Unicorn and Washington counties, I know saved lives there. Probably other counties did. I just don't have it off the top of my head, but we did a lot of communication there.
And again, if people look outside, because if you look how quickly the water came up too someone could look outside and say, I don't know what they're talking about. They're crazy. And, we were looking at how much rainfall was falling and the National Weather Service was looking at and updating their models.
And, we sent folks to my, one of my district coordinators, Michelle Matson went to the Irwin Medical Center in Koy County, unco Medical Center there. And she ended up being on the rooftop and was one of the last people taken off [00:29:00] by a helicopter. Yeah, it, they can happen to us and they will happen to us. And so sometimes it'll unfold fascia than we expect. Right. So the water rising surprised everyone how quickly it rose there on the Nolo Chue River in the town of Irwin. And wrought incredible devastation. And so things I'd like people to know is we're like 50 weeks after the disaster.
There are still tremendous needs there, there are still recovery needs, there's still people that are hurting. And you have groups like the Appalachia Service Project and Habitat for Humanities chapter up there that are doing, helping to re help people get re-homed and have safe places to live.
They still need volunteers to help build those structures. Af the immediate aftermath of the disaster, there's always a tremendous outpouring of material aid, of people wanting to show up and help. And that's great and in many ways is necessary, but those needs are as acute today as they were on the 29th of September.[00:30:00]
And if folks have a heart to serve and want to help. This is a great time to do it. And
Spencer: can you describe some of those acute needs? Like, I, it might be hard for people to understand sitting here now, like what are some needs that are not being addressed?
Patrick: Yeah, so there's still housing needs and, the Appalachia service project, I think committed to rebuilding 150 homes.
And, FEMA has helped provide some housing as well for those that have opted in that were eligible and then opted in to take it. But there's still a gap in the number of houses, homes, apartments that were destroyed and people needing permanent shelter if they wanna stay in the community.
And it's, good for the communities, for people to stay there. Some of the, so many small businesses were impacted, in Newport and Co county, in Irwin, in Elizabeth and in Carter County. And so there's. Patronizing those small businesses is a, an incredible way to help too.
And, after [00:31:00] disaster, really giving cash to the, a reputable nonprofit organization that's doing work with survivors is an incredibly valuable way to help, a lot of folks send stuff and you want, I'll tell a story. When I first moved to Ohio and my wife was in grad school, she spent a lot of weekends where she was studying and did not, she was my future wife at the time, did not want to hang out while she was trying to do her research project or work on her practicums or those kinds of things.
And so I went and volunteered at a donations warehouse, and I was stunned to open, a plastic shopping bag and see dirty underwear and, i've told variations of this story a lot, but I thought, what would motivate someone to do that? And then you talk to people and I've seen other disasters where there's tremendous amounts of donations and people have an i their impulse to give something, do something is so strong that it's not always rational around what they might give.
Or they [00:32:00] think that someone's gonna have a laundry set up and they'll wash things that are going and, I don't wanna call it selfish giving, but there's ways to give that can help the survivors own their own recovery. They didn't ask to be impacted by disasters. And so many choices are taken away from them at that moment. Like, they don't get the choice to be in their home, or they don't get the choice to be in their business if they're a small business owner.
They have things that have been taken away from them. And so the more we can honor their dignity by giving them the autonomy to make their own decisions, by having them have cash. I think the better for them, the better for the community. They can spend money on things when they need it, rather than trying to figure out how they're gonna get a couch into a home they don't have yet.
And it's very difficult. We were very fortunate in the aftermath of Helene that Bristol Motor Speedway and Jerry Caldwell and that whole team over there really stepped up in a tremendous way. And we had a county emergency manager who had. Brandon Smith from Putnam County who spent, more than [00:33:00] who spent months up there helping them manage along with some other folks from the community to help us just take in the mountains of donated resources from across the United States of America and try to put them to good use and make them available for folks who had been impacted by the hurricane, without them stepping up.
It's become, we call it the disaster within the disaster. The disaster after the disaster, trying to manage those material goods. And most places won't have a Bristol with lots of space and not in race season, right? The more we can, when we're trying to help give cash or go give up our time, and not just in the aftermath, not just in the days or weeks after, but a year after, I think it would be important.
Spencer: What's it like reporting directly to the governor and that reporting structure changes? Like how do things shift when that call happens?
Patrick: We [00:34:00] try to be leaning forward, the, I, I'm appointed by the governor I serve at his or her pleasure. And we work with the governor's office it's not just the governor, it's the COO, the chief of staff and others.
And so we just try to keep everyone cross level information, right. So these, this is what we're seeing, and obviously folks will reach out to them directly and they do a tremendous job of making sure that we're tracking concerns that the senators and the legislators and the US Senators and us.
Congressmen are hearing and reporting and try to make a holistic situational picture outta that and then, and act against it as quickly as we can. Yeah, I've been pretty fortunate in the state of Tennessee to work for two really tremendous administrations and appointed originally by Governor Bill Haslam and his team who was tremendous.
And then Governor Bill Lee really thankful he kept me and obviously we've had a lot of disasters together. But we try to get better every [00:35:00] time we respond to things, every time we are engaged in these long-term recoveries. And yeah, I think Tennesseeans are pretty fortunate. We've had a really, a series both sides of the aisle of tremendous governors, really going back to the late 1970s.
Carli: I imagine a natural disaster preparedness and response is super different than what you experienced with the pandemic in 2020. Can you tell me a little bit about how that, I mean, I know we talked about Ebola and that you had run table scenarios and then they happened with that one, but how is that so different from everything else that you had to triage?
Patrick: So I had written as a planner, been the lead planner on some pandemic planning in the state of Ohio. And one of the things that we highlighted was we thought there would be supply chain problems. Like there, like the United States of America does not manufacture very much. Anymore that's not really high end.
So mass producing things is a skillset that in the last [00:36:00] three decades we've fallen out of. It's one of the things I really disliked when I was a management major and, we're the talk about transitioning to a service economy. And I thought that was pretty shortsighted that other places in the world would not always have our best interest at heart, and they will gladly subsidize taking manufacturing jobs here.
So I knew as a planner that we were gonna have supply problems, and I knew that in 2007. Fast forward 13 years, I'm in a different state and I knew we were gonna have supply problems. The surprise for me was how quickly the supply chains ground to a halt and they did ground to a halt.
So China shut down exports on certain goods and a lot of those things they were the biggest producer of in the world, right? A couple of those examples. N95 masks N 90 fives, primarily gowns, those kinds of things. Or precursor chemicals to other things, at the industrial scale that was required to, to meet the needs.
We just saw that the supply chain [00:37:00] ground to a halt. So exports, they were stopping their exports. And so we really organized, the governor organized the COVID-19 unified command to help coordinate efforts, the Financial Stimulus Accountability Group to better leverage the federal aid that was coming to stabilize our business interest and Tennessee's economy.
I think, there are critics of whatever we did or didn't do on both sides. And I think since we have critics on both sides, I think that's a pretty good indicator that we thread that difficult needle in, in the right way, in the best way that we could. But we really worked hard.
Like ECD had folks that could help us verify that things we were buying actually existed overseas. And so I'm thankful for their help too. That's not something that was written into a plan, right? Having someone from economic community development use their contacts to drive over and make sure that a, a warehouse full of masks actually existed was not something in a plan, but it was something we were able to do because we build relationships and we practice doing other things [00:38:00] together. Yeah, so the difference for me, like in COVID-19 was how drastically the supply chain vaccine hesitancy has been a thing for as long as I've been in emergency management and, so that didn't surprise me as much as, again, the extent of it, right? The, not just the hesitancy, but the folks that are just downright against vaccination now. And we're seeing those implications play out across our nation today. I'm sure there's a headline somewhere right now about something that's happening around vaccinations, but some of those things surprised me and, we have an economy that relies on visitors, tourists, and I think we thread the right needle, the right tone, and caring for people's freedoms of movement and expression in the fact that we have critics on all sides that we didn't do enough or we did too much, I think is not a bad sign.
Spencer: Once you were done with the pandemic, there were a lot of people that. Either in the middle of it or at the end. We're done in general [00:39:00] with service. Yeah. We've had a number of guests that were tied to it in various ways. We've had Lisa Pearcy here and I've had others that yeah. Love Lisa.
Yeah. Yes. So we've had a lot of stories that have come from that. What was your mindset on the other side? Like, were you, of course, exhausted, but sometimes those things can fundamentally change you in ways that you didn't expect?
Patrick: Yeah, so I have, I'm not done with COVID yet, right? So I'm still dealing with FEMA on payments for things.
And while everyone else has moved on we're still dealing, having discussions with the federal government around eligibility for certain things. And I love that discussions.
Spencer: We're having discussions. Yeah. Yeah, we are. And
Patrick: they'll, hopefully they'll come around. But I knew it was going to be a long campaign, so I.
Randomly came across a message I sent to my staff in March of 2020 looking for something else. And I talked about we are in for probably two years of [00:40:00] hard work to help stabilize. And we, our team just did tremendous things. Like we built two COVID low acuity units, which we ended up never using.
But you know, so many places were building them in. Like we even started at Music City Center and then I sat down and with the unified command group with the governor and Dr. Pearcy and Jeff Holmes and tremendous team in Governor Lee's office. And we just sat down and we looked and said. We're not going, people are gonna be coming back here and this is not where we want this.
And so even though they were super willing, and so we took a step back and we said, where are the places that we can hold onto this? Should we need it? Where we have excess capacity or where're building capacity beds where we could help treat people with COVID and not put general hospital populations at risk.
And we took a, an old newspaper printing building [00:41:00] in Memphis Commercial Peel double building, turned it into a, a hulking foreign two bed, low acuity unit. And we worked with Nashville General Hospital to take their probably underused endoscopy suite and turn it into bed space and then an unused floor.
And thankfully it never quite got to where we needed it, but we got really. Close there at the end of 2020, beginning of 2021 before the disease really started passing. But you know, it's talking about COVID is not a popular thing. And as someone that was engaged in trying to balance our response and support our communities, but yeah tough things.
Carli: So you've talked a couple of times about your wife. I know you have several kids.
Patrick: I do. I have four kids.
Carli: What's it like managing a family when your job is to be available for crisis? I imagine that's super tricky.
Patrick: [00:42:00] Yeah, I'm married really well. I think that's
Carli: it's always a good start.
Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. And I think my wife would say that it's hard, there's, it's not easy because even things like when there's severe weather coming, I am.
If we're expecting it to have kinetic impacts or damage things, I'm usually going to be at the state emergency operation center. And so that means usually my wife and our four kids and dog will be home alone in our house that doesn't have a basement. And we'll spend some time prepping our lowest level interior windowless room, which in our case is a half bath under the stairwell, like a lot of houses in middle Tennessee with bike helmets and a pry bar and flashlight and UNO card deck and boots and gloves and a cell phone charger and weather radio so that, they can be as safe as possible.
And then obviously I'm always paying attention to where weather is going and like, it's been close enough, more than a handful of occasions where I've [00:43:00] called her at two in the morning and said, Hey, it's sorry, I gotta get the kids up and go to the. The downstairs space and it's scary and it's not fair to her.
But my service is not just me, it's her and our four beautiful children.
Carli: Well and a shout out to Nashville Severe weather. because they're the ones that I listen to all night when those things are happening. Yeah,
Spencer: they're exceptional.
Carli: Love those guys. They are. Yeah.
Spencer: I could make the case that you would be like a world class prepper, like that you would have serious prep stuff in your garage and I could also make the case that you wouldn't, where do you fall on that spectrum?
Patrick: I'm always surprised I'm not more of a prepper than I am actually. Okay. I have friends that are incredible preppers. I won't tell you who they are because they would be really mad about that. They would like, they would very much dislike that, wouldn't they? Yeah. I have family that are big preppers as well.
We have food on hand that can get us through several weeks. Canned or dry but not like six months worth that some places have, or some people [00:44:00] have. And some of that is that food's just not very tasty. And if you wanna make use of it, you should eat it, consume it as you go, and stuff like that.
And I don't think the family's willing to do that either. But, I think you can take prudent things. I wish more people thought about preparing, without necessarily having massive amounts of food. And, some, we live in a just in time world, and there's great and terrible things about that both.
And it's made us very efficient and effective at certain things. It's also created incredible vulnerabilities that primarily around disruptions of the supply chain, supply chains. And I would encourage folks, start with your finances. Start with knowing what you have and where you have.
Start with having money set aside so that you can get by for a little bit. Should life be very disruptive if you get disrupted by disaster. And it just goes a long way. Know where your documents are, like having a go bag, which, my [00:45:00] agency's done a lot of talking about in this national preparedness month, which is September.
Having your documents, your essential documents, having them backed up to the cloud or an external disc that you can take with you is so important. And if folks would just start there. And then if you wanna do more prepping around, doomsday kind of prepping and zombie apocalypse, by all means do that.
But if we get more folks taking care of the things that will help them in their day-to-day life. I think the better
Spencer: if you tabletop zombies. I do want to know about that. All right, Patrick,
Patrick: you tell me that. I want
Carli: a 48 hour window on zombies. Please. I gotta
Patrick: tell you, before zombie exercises, before any of these things became a thing, a friend of mine who worked at the Ohio Emergency Management Agency with me came up with it.
And he was our, one of our field folks, and I was a planner, and his cubicle opened up right next to mine. And I always thought he was just irreverent. And I'm very serious. My kid brother says, I was born 40. And my buddy Mark was he was very irreverent. He like, just irritated me for, I don't know why he [00:46:00] irritated me so much, because he was a little brasher than I am, I think.
And but he came up with these zombie exercises and I just remember rolling my eyes and then I read his materials. I'm like, oh, these aren't bad. And then he was in the office one day at the cubicle, and so I just wheeled over and said, all right, talk to me about you have a reason why.
Why zombies, and I don't think maybe World War Z had just been written and had not yet been, become popularized, but, so Mark and I had like a 30 minute conversation around why zombies. And when you do exercises you're burdened with the curse of experience or the curse of knowledge. So like for instance, like if you, what you've experienced, like if you think that's the worst thing you can ever face, then everything else you'll just discount.
And so you get fire chiefs who say, that's not how that happens. Or a police chief that says, well, that's not what we would do. We would do this and this. Well, how do you know? Because that's what we did last time. And so if you want to drive a scenario that was public health executive elected officials in government, [00:47:00] police, law enforcement at all levels fire departments, ambulance services, Joe Public.
Zombies was a great way to do it. because no one could say, well that's not what we would do, because they've never experienced it. And the cursive experience is a real thing. Right? That's when you look at, we just had the 20th anniversary of Katrina. Their experiences, the people that died, a lot of them had experienced tremendous hurricanes in the past.
And their experiences with those hurricanes informed bad decisions for Katrina because sometimes things are one of one. And I think for zombie exercises. Not burdening people with the cursive experience at the time. This is almost 20 years ago too. It was novel and fun and, we didn't have the Walking Dead as a television show or a culture phenomenon like we do today.
But at the time I thought Mark did a great job of creating and justifying wine. And so he's still one of the people I. When I have a question or want to find a creative way to solve things my buddy Marcus, who I turn to,
Carli: so the answer is they have already [00:48:00] tabletop zombies. That's right. So we're safe.
It hasn't happened within 40 hours of that exercise.
Spencer: Patrick, we've covered a lot today. Everything from Ebola to zombies, and that's a wide range for what we usually cover on signature required. We're doing something here today. We're delivering value, I'm sure. So what I want to finish it up with is how we finish every podcast is I've got three short fill in the blank sentences for you where if you will repeat the prompt to me and then fill it in with either a word or a short phrase that you think completes the thought.
Okay?
Patrick: Okay.
Spencer: All right, here we go. Number one, the most important skill for crisis leadership is blank.
Patrick: The most important skill for crisis leadership is. Calm. You're the right guy for that. I'm gonna say even
Carli: the way he said that was calm, played.
Spencer: Number two, the biggest misconception about emergency management [00:49:00] is blank.
Patrick: The biggest concept about emergency management.
Spencer: Biggest
Patrick: misconception. Oh, the biggest misconception about emergency management is that our programs are designed to make survivors whole.
Spencer: Yeah. And number three, one thing I wish more people knew about being prepared for a disaster is blank.
Patrick: One thing I wish more people knew about being prepared for disaster is that they can be prepared for a disaster.
Spencer: I like that. I think there's some big themes that have come out of our conversation here today that. I think provide education around a space that people spend a lot of time hoping that somebody has thought about, but maybe they haven't thought about it a lot themselves. It's kinda like where we started this whole episode, which is people probably come with a very vague [00:50:00] understanding of what you do, like emergencies in the name.
I figure it probably has to do with disasters in Tennessee. But as we've drilled down more into it, and there's a lot of complexity that goes into what you do. And I think what I take away from this is that there is a role for every Tennessean to play in not only disaster prep, but disaster response.
And that looks different for each person, but it's also. A defined thing like it is giving in some capacity, it's volunteering in some capacity, it's being educated. We've talked about insurance, like all sorts of different things that help the community but also help your family. And so I think your messaging in the role that you have filled across multiple administrations is one that I appreciate having an extra [00:51:00] megaphone on Signature acquired today.
because I think it's an important message for Tennesseans and hopefully for other states that wanna see how it's done. Well, they can look and learn from Patrick.
Patrick: Oh yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, we have, we've got a great team. And if I could just one, one more thing. We're seeing a change in how people engage civically and, we live in the volunteer state and we have a tremendous outpouring of people after disasters when something big happens and.
If people would just stay engaged in their communities, keep their communities vibrant, and do the mundane things that build connection and cohesiveness and civility, I think that goes so far in making us, keeping us a great place to live and raise families, and a readier place for when bad things befall us.
Spencer: Patrick, thank you for joining us today on Signature Required. It's been a real treat. Thank you.[00:52:00]
Patrick Sheen, director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. I had a number of different questions coming into this podcast, some that you're allowed to ask and some of which you only get to ask when you're on a podcast, which is really fun because to know Patrick, I think, is to know you get a very.
Calm, very buttoned up. Great man in a crisis. But. Gotta work a little bit to crack a smile or to be able to have the right moment to be able to ask some things. But, we talked about zombies, we talked about Ebola and he mentioned in there that some of his friends are a reverent and what they do which I just really laughed.
I'm glad we brought some reverence to his life today. Carli,
Carli: I really wished I could have asked him about. Doing a Terminator tabletop read, right? Like what happens when AI bots take over the world? I wonder if they've figured that one out. And I would also like a pre-warning before they run [00:53:00] that, because I wanna be prepared.
When he was talking, I had a couple of, lemme say it this way, when he was talking, I thought it was really interesting how he was talking about the bias you get by looking out your window when people are hearing about the weather. Let's say he was talking about during Hurricane Helene, they're like, well, we have blue skies.
Why should I be worried about rainfall? And how a lot of the flooding actually happened from rainfall that came from North Carolina. And it made me think so much about that, just how much we trust our own eyes instead of gauges. And I found that really convicting that sometimes I, I wonder if I look out my window and just assume certain things and.
How it really is our job to be informed. And maybe you don't trust every expert, maybe you don't just take it at face value, but getting the data instead of assuming you know it all, when there's people like Patrick that spend their whole lives trying to know it all about this space. I thought that was a [00:54:00] really interesting tidbit.
Spencer: I can also appreciate Patrick's answer when he talked about his greatest dread was not actually any type of natural disaster. It is the reality that will hit people that just because their situation is stabilized, like the fire is put out, the waters recede, the responsibility and the capability of the organization is in no way to restore you to what you were before.
So if you have lost property, obviously losing lives, health, all the expenses, everything that comes with it, it's on you. And I think that's a. Weighty feeling for Patrick, who probably spends a lot of his time thinking about how to protect people from suffering, knows that he may be able to help save a life, but the life that people return to afterwards is [00:55:00] not at all what he would want for them.
Carli: Well, he talked a lot about the criticism they get from the left and the right and how he's really trying to thread the needle there. And it's so hard because you can tell he spends his whole life running every scenario possible to try to mitigate disasters and save as many people as possible.
But it's an impossible job because you know you're gonna be put through the ringer for what you did and didn't do no matter what. And to the idea of community, we say it here all the time, and he said it, government has a role, but it can't do everything. And. I've said it before. I'll say again. I think leadership, we always think of leadership as these big titles and names on a door and offices, but the most powerful leadership is small leadership.
It's the leadership to show up in your community, to know what needs to be done and to know who to mobilize. And I think we take for granted the intensity and the power around. Community [00:56:00] involvement, the people that are on the streets that know who needs what and when. And a lot of that, I believe is the job of the local church.
And there are churches that really step into that power and do that well. And churches that I hope hear things like this and feel motivated to think about what is my response in a disaster? And not just for the next week while it's in a news cycle, what is my response 52 weeks later to these families, to these souls that suffering doesn't end when the cars pack up and everyone goes home.
