On this episode that we recorded on my favorite day of the year, Star Wars Day, I'm joined by the incredible Ginny Katz. Ginny is the founder and CEO of HazAdapt, a safety app and platform transforming how communities prepare for and adapt to hazards.

Ginny is a Spitfire of research, innovation, and ethics on a mission to build a new era of emergency and safety technology that responsibly supports bottom-up resilience and top-down engagement throughout a disaster. At the front of community resilience innovation, Ginny and the HazAdapt team are redefining how people and communities engage with safety information and discovering online and offline insights critical for local emergency managers and preparedness authorities.

Paid subscribers on stateofdisaster.com get to see the extended version of this interview with a demo of the NEW ResiliencePoint feature that shows emergency managers how their community is interacting with hazard guidance, revealing trends, gaps, and opportunities to strengthen resilience. You also get to see me have an allergy attack mid-recording! FUN!

You can access the HazAdapt app directly for free by clicking here!

A conversation with Brandy Mai, a practitioner of emergency management, public information, and law.

Brandy Mai is a U.S. Army veteran who was born and raised in deep south Louisiana. She is also an attorney and an emergency management consultant who's worked extensively in communications and public information, helping multiple organizations and agencies navigate their crisis and disaster strategies.

Her professional experience includes work in military and government, corporate, nonprofit, emergency management, homeland security, and public safety sectors, including a position as lead public information officer for a state emergency management agency. In her spare time, Brandy is an advocate for veterans, children, disabled persons, marginalized populations, and persons with mental health diagnoses. She and her four kids reside in Savannah, Georgia.

This is a long episode because there's so much that we could talk about, but Brandy will be back to chat again. am sure if you're listening or watching on stateofdisaster.com, you're experiencing the whole episode with video and without ads. Your subscription is also directly supporting disaster relief. If you'd like to join me on the show, advertise or submit a disaster story for me to tell on your behalf, you can reach me at matt@stateofdisaster.com

On April 4th, 2025, FEMA issued a press release stating that they were ending the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program, BRIC for short, and canceling all applications from fiscal years 2020 to 2023. If grant funds had not been distributed, they were immediately returned to either the Disaster Relief Fund or the U.S. Treasury. The press release also referred to BRIC as wasteful and politicized. In this episode, Bear Afkhami joins the show to discuss the immediate and long-term repercussions of losing this funding, what could possibly be so political about flood and fire prevention, the importance of pre-disaster mitigation, and what the future may look like without grants like BRIC.

Bear Afkhami is an emergency manager at MPACT Strategic Consulting with 13+ years of experience in prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery. He is also a professor of uncrewed and autonomous technology. He has an MS in Analytics, a BA in Intelligence, and is a graduate of the FEMA National Emergency Management Academy. Bear has numerous credentials, including the FEMA Professional Continuity Practitioner, FEMA Infrastructure Protection, EMT and ACCO Climate Change Professional. He has written articles for public safety publications and regularly presents at emergency management conferences on the topics of mitigation, resiliency, and technology. In 2022, 23 and 24, he presented on drones, artificial intelligence, mitigation, climate change, water and the BRIC program at major conferences such as the National Hurricane Conference, National Resilience Summit, the CyberMaryland Conference, the Texas Emergency Management Conference, as well as the Virginia and Maryland Emergency Management Symposiums. Today, we say goodbye to BRIC (for now) and look to the future of disaster mitigation.

If you're a paid subscriber through stateofdisaster.com, you're listening without ads, either on the site with video and enhanced show notes or on your own private podcast subscription. A percentage of the revenue is going directly to disaster relief. And you get about 10 extra minutes of content this time around, where I asked Bear to put his private sector hat on and approach disaster mitigation as a startup founder. Because in addition to all of his emergency management experience, he's actually written a book called The Startup King. Take 50% off a year-long membership by clicking this link: https://stateofdisaster.substack.com/6fbac94a

• (00:00:00) - Introduction to Emergency Management and BRIC
• (00:07:08) - The Importance of BRIC and Recent Changes
• (00:10:45) - Bipartisan Support and Controversies Surrounding BRIC
• (00:14:49) - Mitigation Strategies and Their Impact
• (00:22:11) - Innovation through BRIC
• (00:27:42) - The Role of Partnerships in Emergency Management
• (00:33:09) - The Asymmetry of Perception
• (00:38:42) - The Cost of Disasters: Beyond Immediate Impact
• (00:39:35) - Bipartisan Communication in Emergency Management
• (00:44:47) - Utilizing 406 Mitigation for Future Preparedness
• (00:46:41) - Integrating Mitigation and Recovery Efforts
• (00:54:20) - Learning from States with Muscle Memory
• (00:57:33) - Self-Reliance of Emergency Managers