Christopher T. Geldart — Director, Office of National Capital Region Coordination, FEMA — Opening Plenary Session

Bio (From the SARMA Conference Agenda)

Christopher Geldart is FEMA’s Director of the Office of National Capital Region Coordination. Before Joining FEMA in April 2007, Mr. Geldart worked for the State of Maryland as Assistant Director of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security, beginning in 2004. He designed, developed and led the State’s Homeland Security Program Executive Office, which included management of over $400 million in funding and required coordination with all of Maryland’s local and municiple governments and the entire state enterprise. He also designed and led grant application, allocation/distribution and outcome tracking processes for DHS, Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant programs for the improvement of Maryland’s all hazards response and recovery capabilities. In addition, he served as primary liaison for the State to the multiple coordinating offices of DHS, to include Preparedness, Grants and Training, Infrastructure Protection, Information Analysis and the Office of State and Local Coordination, and the FBI.

From 2002-2004, Mr. Geldart was a Program Manager at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he provided program management for the Installation Preparedness Program, Unified Defense Excersize 04 and the Technical Assistance Team. He served as a lead in developing scenarios and training materials that test naval installation Weapons of Mass Destruction plans and directives.

From 1989-2001, Mr. Geldart served in the United States Marine Corps, where he had several leadership positions in the Fleet Marine Force and was certified and served as an instructor in a joint military formal school environment at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center. He has a Bachelor’s degree in American History from the University of Maryland.

Intro

The introduction provided a background of himself and a layout of his speech to come. He also introduced us to a way of strategic hazard identification and evaluation for leadership decisions. He wants us to ask two questions: What are we most susceptible to? (What keeps us up at night?) and How can we look at these to Mitigate Risk? We will look at Regional Education on Risk Analysis, Reguirements Generation, Risk Assessments, and RIsk Management.

Regional Education on Risk Analysis

The first step to becoming educated in these fields is th become familiar with and determine roles and responsibilities based on the HSA, Fed, EM, and SME’s. We must have a tacit understanding and come to a group consensus belief. Now, we need to look at the elements of risk. Like all Risk Analysts, Threat, Vulnerability, and consequences are the base elements we need to considers (R=TxVxC). We need to understand what they represent for the analysis we are doing. Then, we look at the components of risk: Assessment vs. Management, this comparison will come later. Also, vulnerability assessment is just a piece of Risk Analysis. The assessment lets you know what you are up against, while management deals with mitigating the risk.

Requirements Generation

No one can cover every part of Risk Analysis for everything they look at. Determining the focus, or scope, of each particular analysis is key. It is our job to ask the strategic leaders the question about what keeps them up at night, what are they afraid of? Then we can determine their output desires. This makes sense when you sit back and think about it. How can you assess the risk of a person’s business if you don’t know who they are or what they want? Their is always the people aspect that is vital to success in this field.

Risk Assessment

The speaker wanted us to determine and verify the hazards faced by the National Capitol Region (NCR) based on the previously mentioned question we should ask. He said that we need to move away from issues being handled via a black box and the formula(R=TxVxC) to produce a number that analysis is then based on. It is an Analytical Process, based on empirical data mixed in with probability and historical information.

Risk Management

I stared this topic during the presentation because I felt that Mr. Geldart wanted this emphasized. This is the faucet that lets us actually mitigate the risk. It is derived from an analysis of the Risk Assessment. From our observations, we can generate recommendations on specific actions and cost benefit analysis of mitigation options. A picture of an x-y chart was shown, plotting Likelihood (y) vs. Consequence (x). The exponential downward slope contained the acceptable risk area between the curve and the axis.

Questions and Answers

Q: When looking at the likelihood of an attack, how do you address uncertaintanty?

A: This is a maturation process, we have to rely on Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) and past occurances. We wold like to have as much empirical data as possible but there will always be uncertainties. Think about how we would get the empirical data, an attack. We surely don’t want too much data because that means we are getting hammered by our enemies, but without being attacked, we can’t test the systems. Uncertainty is very important to the Risk Analysis field as a whole.

Q: How do you secure regional operations?

A: This is not easy, Governance was the main way pointed out by Mr. Geldart, but also participation and paying attention are vitally important.

Q: How do you measure success and/or package lessons learned?

A: They have funding from regional partners that does just that. He believed that if their information helped one person, it was a success. He also said they need to keep this running until they get more empirical data.

Summary

Overall, I was very interested in what Mr. Geldart had to say. He seemed to be very in to what he was talking about and was a very good public speaker. He really set the tone for the rest of the day that only continued to impress me and make me very happy that I am attending this conference.

At this point, I encourage you to comment, or head over to Maiselog or JBWawrzyniak’s blog to read up more on this speaker.