[Photo: In February 2009, Pierce County surface water crews repaired a salmon ladder with "six man" rocks. The salmon ladder and roadway were damaged after flooding from the Carbon River due to torrential rains. Courtesy of Adam DuBrowa/FEMA.]

Editor’s Introduction: Many people are curious about how professionals working in the emergency management field were able to achieve their positions. The paths to a career in emergency management are many and varied. Paul Shukovsky has written a short column about how he became an emergency manager and the path that took him to serving as a disaster recovery coordinator for Pierce County, Wash.
 
If you’re looking for a career in emergency management perhaps this personal narrative will show you a path, or if you’re in the profession they may inspire you to write your own story and submit it for possible publication. E-mail your submission to Editor Jim McKay at jmckay@govtech.com, and please keep stories to fewer than 600 words. Submissions will be edited to fit Emergency Management’s editorial style.


It’s been a circuitous route on the way to becoming a disaster recovery coordinator for Pierce County, Wash. — sandwiched between Puget Sound and the stunning, snow-capped, volcanic-summit of Mount Rainier.

The serpentine path wended its way through hurricane-ravaged Florida cities, Iowa towns torn asunder by tornadoes, and Balkan villages ravaged by genocidal violence. For most of the last 30 years, I’ve worked as an investigative reporter for newspapers. Since the 9/11 attacks, I covered terrorism, national security and three-letter agencies like the FBI, DEA, ATF, CIA, NSA, ICE — well, you get the idea.

So how does a reporter become an emergency manager? Do the skill sets translate? Keep in mind that like reporters, emergency managers traffic in information. We collect information from numerous sources, analyze it, aggregate it and disseminate it to those who need to know it. But early in my career, before becoming a journalist, I worked as a treatment team leader at a psychiatric center. Being a mental health counselor is actually a very good skill to have, as I’ve never been in either a newsroom or an emergency operations center that didn’t need a good shrink on staff.

While working as a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter, I used my time off to volunteer with the American Red Cross as a disaster mental health specialist. Since 1997, the Red Cross has deployed me to hurricanes in Florida, tornadoes and floods in Iowa, as well as numerous smaller-scale disasters in western Washington.

In 1999, I took a six-month sabbatical from the newspaper to take a paid position as a delegate with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Switzerland. After a one-week, delegate-induction course, I climbed aboard a Spanish Army C-130 and flew into Tirana, Albania, for overland deployment to Kosovo. We went in on the heels of NATO troops to set up a program of psychological support for genocide survivors. The devastation to both the physical and psychological landscapes was staggering.

My volunteer work as a mental health counselor over the years has focused on providing psychotherapy for vulnerable populations at both the Seattle Indian Health Board and the 45th Street Clinic, which serves low-income and indigent patients in Seattle.

Upon arriving at the Pierce County Department of Emergency Management in April 2009, I offered my emergency management colleagues the same rate for psychotherapy as did Lucy of the Peanuts cartoon strip: 5 cents/hour. So far, I’ve had no takers.