Feed Description Twenty-five years ago, 2,977 people died and an entire profession was rebuilt around that morning. Host Todd T. DeVoe, CEM, who was working as a paramedic in Southern California that day, is joined by three IAEM regional leaders who carry different pieces of that history. Anthony S. Mangeri, MPA, CPM, CEM, Past President of IAEM-USA Region 2, was the Operations Chief at the New Jersey Emergency Operations Center on September 11, 2001, coordinating the state’s response to the attacks on the World Trade Center. Michael Prasad, MA, CEM, President of IAEM-USA Region 2, has spent his career on the policy, mass care, and professionalization side of what came after. Joseph J. Leonard, Jr., MS, CEM, a retired Coast Guard Commander and President of IAEM-USA Region 6, brings the maritime and Gulf Coast view, including the half-million-person boatlift out of Lower Manhattan that most of this field has never been taught. Together they look at what the field got right, what it overcorrected, what it is quietly forgetting, and what it still owes the responders who are dying from that day. About the Guests Anthony S. Mangeri, MPA, CPM, CEM Chief Operating Officer and Principal at Mangeri Group, LLC, and faculty in disaster science and emergency management at Rowan University and American Military University. He has more than 40 years in emergency management and public safety. During the response to and recovery from the September 11, 2001, attacks, he was the Operations Chief at the New Jersey Emergency Operations Center, where he coordinated the state’s response. He served as New Jersey’s State Hazard Mitigation Officer for over a decade, later served as a town manager, and has been a volunteer firefighter and EMT for more than 35 years, reaching assistant chief and safety officer. He holds an MPA from Rutgers and is a Past President of IAEM-USA Region 2. Michael Prasad, MA, CEM President of IAEM-USA Region 2, covering New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He is a senior research analyst at Barton Dunant Emergency Management Training and Consulting and executive director of the Center for Emergency Management Intelligence Research. He has held director-level emergency management positions with the State of New Jersey and the American Red Cross, and has served in leadership roles on more than 25 disaster response operations, including Superstorm Sandy. He serves as a liaison officer for ESF #6, Mass Care, for FEMA Region 2 during declared disasters. His first book, Emergency Management Threats and Hazards: Water, was published by CRC Press in 2024. CDR Joseph J. Leonard, Jr., MS, CEM, USCG (ret.) President of IAEM-USA Region 6, covering Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, and President and Chief Operating Officer of Unified Services Consulting Group, LLC, in Houston. A retired Coast Guard Commander, he has served in incident management and planning roles across major Gulf Coast responses, including Hurricane Harvey, where he worked as an incident management team coordinator and planning section chief and later as an ESF #10 liaison across sixteen counties during the post-storm hazardous materials response. He served as Region 6 Vice President from 2020 to 2024 and has been a Certified Emergency Manager since 2015. [Confirm preferred bio language with Joe before publication.] Episode Overview There is now a cohort of working emergency managers who were toddlers on September 11, 2001, and students entering EM degree programs who were not born yet. For them, 9/11 is not a memory. It is a chapter. That is not a criticism of them. It is a problem for the rest of us, because most of what they are being handed was designed in response to something they have to take on faith. This episode puts four vantage points in the same room. Anthony Mangeri was in the seat that morning, running operations at the New Jersey EOC while the state stood up its response across the river. Michael Prasad has spent twenty-five years working the consequences: mass care, mitigation, intelligence, and the long argument over whether emergency management is a profession or an assignment. Joe Leonard brings the maritime line and the Gulf Coast, a region that inherited a security architecture written for terrorism and had to turn it toward hurricanes, ports, and petrochemical complexes. And host Todd DeVoe was working as a paramedic in Southern California, where it was not yet six in the morning and where nothing local could be done, but where every mandate that followed would land anyway. That last vantage point is the one most of this field actually shares. Region 2 lived the event that wrote the doctrine. Region 6 inherited it and had it stress-tested against a different hazard every few years since. Region 9, and most of the country, received the requirements without the context that produced them. Putting all three on the same call is the point. Segment Structure * 1. That morning, four vantage points. Anthony opens from the New Jersey EOC. What it was actually like to walk into a state operations center with no playbook for this, with the airspace closed, with a neighboring state’s incident becoming your mass care and transportation problem inside of an hour. Then the far side: Todd on a rig in Southern California before six in the morning, going on shift into a country that had already changed, with no call to run and nothing to do about it. Both are real experiences of that day and the field has only ever told one of them. * 2. The command problem. Anthony leads. Two agencies operating in the same vertical space on incompatible radio systems, no unified command, no accountability for personnel who had self-deployed into a collapsing structure. Every one of those is still a live failure mode in 2026. * 3. The water. Joe leads. The boatlift, and why an evacuation of more than half a million people executed largely by private mariners is not in most EM curricula. Then what followed: the Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002, the Coast Guard’s move from Transportation into DHS in 2003, Area Maritime Security Committees, and TWIC. * 4. The building spree and the overcorrection. DHS in 2002, FEMA absorbed in 2003, HSPD-5 and NIMS, ICS moving from a wildland tool to a national requirement tied to grant eligibility. Terrorism-first posture by 2005, Katrina exposing what it cost, PKEMRA in 2006 putting all-hazards back in the language. Todd’s entry point is the WMD awareness and NIMS training that arrived in California ambulance bays for an event that happened 3,000 miles away. Anthony’s decade as State Hazard Mitigation Officer is the other, because mitigation is the function that gets starved first. * 5. Two regions, one doctrine. Region 2 lived the event that wrote the doctrine. Region 6 inherited the doctrine and had to turn it toward hurricanes, ports, and petrochemical complexes. Sandy and Maria against Ike, Harvey, and Laura. Michael and Joe lead together. * 6. The long tail. The World Trade Center Health Program, and the fact that more responders have now died of 9/11-related illness than died on the day itself. Exposure tracking as an operational task, not a paperwork task. * 7. Professionalization, and teaching the generation that wasn’t there. All four teach or train. Where the argument over professionalization stands now, whether the CEM means what it was supposed to mean, and what has to be transmitted deliberately once it stops being lived experience. Close here. Key Takeaways * Doctrine written in response to one event carries that event’s assumptions inside it. Know which assumptions you inherited. * The mandate reached every jurisdiction. The context did not travel with it. Most of the people carrying this doctrine were nowhere near the event that produced it. * Interoperability is a governance problem wearing a technology costume. Buying radios did not solve it. Agreements and discipline did. * The largest evacuation of that day was executed by capacity nobody had planned for. Your plan should account for the help that shows up whether you invited it or not. * The pendulum between specialized threat focus and all-hazards capability has swung twice in twenty-five years. It will swing again. Build a program that survives the swing. * Consequences do not end when the incident closes. Exposure tracking, responder health, and mass care documentation are operational tasks. * Institutional memory is not automatic. If it is not taught, it is gone in a generation. Discussion Questions for Your Team * Which of your current plans exist because of 9/11, and would you write them the same way starting today? * If two agencies had to operate in the same footprint tomorrow, what would actually fail first? * Your neighbor’s catastrophe becomes your problem in the first hour. What is your version of that, and have you planned for it? * What capacity in your community would self-organize before you asked, and does your plan have anywhere to put it? * Which of your requirements arrived from somewhere else, and does your staff know why they exist? * What are you documenting about responder exposure that someone will need in 2050? * Who on your staff has no direct memory of 9/11, and what have you deliberately transmitted to them? Resources * The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) * HSPD-5, Management of Domestic Incidents (2003) * Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002 * Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (2006) * National Incident Management System, current edition * World Trade Center Health Program, CDC/NIOSH * Emergency Management Threats and Hazards: Water, Michael Prasad, CRC Press * Center for Emergency Management Intelligence Research, cemir.org * Mangeri Group, LLC * Unified Services Consulting Group, LLC * IAEM-USA Region 2, Region 6, and Region 9 Video IAEM USA Remembers: 25 Years Later: How September 11 Changed Emergency Management This is a pub
