Jessica at WSEMA
Jessica was accepted into the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) Youth Preparedness Council (YPC) in July 2021 after applying for it. The requirements were fairly high so getting accepted is an accomplishment in itself. The Youth Preparedness Council (YPC) was created in 2012 to bring together youth leaders interested in supporting disaster preparedness and making a difference in their communities by completing disaster preparedness projects nationally and locally. The YPC supports FEMA’s commitment to involve America’s youth in preparedness-related activities. It also provides young people an opportunity to present their perspectives, feedback, and opinions to FEMA staff. YPC members regularly meet with staff and attend the annual YPC Summit.
She attends community events to help encourage other youths to get involved in preparing for emergencies and disasters so they can either join local organizations to help when needed or at least have a basic idea of what will be needed during an event so they can volunteer to help. For her it is important that teenagers know what to expect and what needs to be done so they don’t panic too much and hopefully some basic knowledge they learned kicks in so they can help or at least know what the next steps are going to be.
Luckily Jessica has family and friends that are good resources to help her accomplish her goals. Her mom is an Emergency Manager who has had a lot of training and helps her in accomplishing the community outreaches and speaking events. Her dad has 28 years of law enforcement experience and has been on many Type 1 and Type 2 incidents nationally as a single resource and as part of management on several Type 2 Incident Command Teams (ICT). Another friend is the CERT coordinator and helps her out as one of Jessica’s goals is to start another CERT team where teenagers can learn how to help effectively.
As a FEMA YPC representative Jessica attended the Grays Harbor County Emergency Preparedness Expo in Aberdeen, WA to help educate the public on preparing for a major disaster such as an earthquake and tsunami before they happen by having a plan and emergency supplies. She also highlighted the importance of ham radio communications in a disaster as the electricity, cell towers, phone lines, and internet will be down for hours to literally years in some areas leaving two-way radios as the only reliable means of communications. She got her FCC Technician License in early 2021 to help with this as well as being able to talk to us in the many areas where cell service is nonexistent. This is something that youth could easily help with that keeps them out of dangerous disaster areas. This is an important supporting function for the first responders and incident command staff plus youth can do this without being placed in potentially dangerous response areas.
Jessica helps her dad program Motorola and other radios in addition to her help in building a 2-meter ham repeater system, including a controller that can remotely kill the repeater or code it for emergency responder use only. Jessica and her brother are also the recorded voices on the KI7CPI Repeater. This helps the local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) out by providing reliable radio communications for responders connecting all parts of the local fire district as well as spotty coverage to the outside world. It was impossible for responders to talk to other responders at the other end of the fire district prior to having this repeater. Jessica also helped out by being a “Disaster Victim” in CERT trainings and Disaster Airlift Response Team (DART) trainings where the injured are evacuated via private airplanes.
In September 2021 Jessica was a Speaker at the Washington State Emergency Management Association (WSEMA) conference in Spokane Washington representing the FEMA YPC. She spent many days preparing a PowerPoint presentation for the conference. She was the first youth allowed to attend this conference since was part of the YPC so both are more great accomplishments. She gave an overview on YPC, CERT, Disaster Airlift Response Team, Ham Radio, helping educate the public, and how youth are a capable untapped resource that are overlooked. This was her first major public speaking event and there were over 100 attendees in the room. She did an excellent job and found her own unique presentation style.
She was understandably, and surprisingly only, a little nervous at first since she just turned 13 a few months ago, but she settled right in on about the second point on the first slide and began speaking like someone who has given many presentations before. She had the entire audience interested and even laughing several times before she was done. Afterwards many people came over to tell her what a great job she did and she was even invited to be a guest speaker at more upcoming events.
Here is an exert of Jessica’s presentation.
Jessica really enjoyed this and is looking forward to accomplishing the goals she set for herself. She got to meet emergency managers and personnel from all over the state so she now has a bigger pool of resources to draw from to help her meet her goals. Many youths unfortunately have zero interest in helping out other people and become hindrances rather than assets when a disaster strikes so she is hoping to change this as much as possible through outreach and education. She is off to a really good start and has hit the ground running in her YPC position.
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