Сотрудник управления по чрезвычайным ситуациям пишет письма дочери, чтобы объяснить важность своей работы и повысить осведомленность населения

As a father to a newborn, Dorchester County Emergency Management Specialist David Amann was inspired to share a personal bond between him and his daughter, while also educating the public about the county's Emergency Management Department's (EMD) services. Years from now, Josephine will read a series of letters that Amann wrote to her about how his job makes a positive difference in the community. The collection of epistles, called Letters to Josephine, was posted throughout August on the Dorchester EMD Facebook page to promote a month dedicated to EMD awareness. “Not many people truly understand what that profession is and how sort of wide-reaching that profession is growing,” Amann said. “How would I explain to my daughter what I do if she [were] to ask what I do for a living? And that’s sort of where the concept started.” Amann is responsible for updating emergency operations plans for the county. This plan provides a blueprint for the role each county department plays during an emergency. Those roles are known as emergency support functions, or ESFs. The document lays out detailed guidelines for different regions of Dorchester County, and Amann edits it annually. He also oversees training exercises to test whether the plans work in practice. “We’ll have a fake hurricane that’s impacting Dorchester County, and we talk through that plan and determine if what we wrote down on paper might actually work in the real world when these disasters happen,” Amann said. Originally from Long Island, Amann has been interested in weather and general science since childhood. He remembers sitting in the garage with his dad during a thunderstorm in order to watch the lightning. He read books about natural disasters, and some of his favorite movies were “Twister” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” During his junior year of high school, he took a meteorology class that fueled his interest. It also helped him pass the time while he waited to be able to take the New York City fire department test. Toward the end of college, Amann interned with the National Weather Service (NWS) in Upton, New York, helping with things like developing forecast products and launching the weather balloon. Amann knew very early on that being a broadcast meteorologist was not a good fit for him. “The immediate thing people always go to anytime you mention, ‘I’m a meteorologist,’ [is], ‘Oh, you’re wrong half the time, but you still get paid.’ Like, that’s not fun,” said Amann. Emergency management, he said, combines many of his interests and suits his high-energy, warm personality, while still allowing him to help people in a meaningful way. “I really joined the field because I got scared of being in a dark federal government office, and I was too much of a wimp to just be myself and be a broadcast meteorologist at that time,” Amann said. “I found this sort of combination of first responder, firefighter and meteorology [that] emergency management sort of is.” Amann said he is heavily involved in public education, not only his team’s day-to-day tasks, but also ensuring people are prepared for potential natural disasters. He coordinates with public information officers and other community leaders at a variety of public outreach events. Emergency preparedness is an area many families fall short, Amann said, even in areas prone to hurricanes. He encounters people who are either severely underprepared or live in constant fear of a natural disaster. The most dangerous, he said, are those who have grown to be over-confident after living in the Lowcountry for many years. With hurricane season nearing its peak, Amann said each season unfolds differently. Each year, the NWS releases a hurricane forecast predicting the number of hurricanes. But severe weather events can shift quickly from original predictions. He added that people sometimes misunderstand how forecast rain percentages work and then blame meteorologists for the outcomes. Amann said the most reliable weather or natural disaster information will always come from official sources, not citizen social media posts. Local outlets in the Lowcountry mostly feed their information from the Charleston NWS office. “We take their information, which might be a little too scientific for the general masses, and sort of circulate it and filter it out to make it more digestible to people,” Amann said. Amann shared tips when building emergency preparedness kits. Aside from basic items like water or batteries, he said kits should be designed based on personal lifestyle needs. For example, if someone likes to read, they should include a book in their emergency kit. As someone who owns a shelf-lined wall full of boardgames, Amann keeps a card or dice game in his personal kit. Above all, he said, people should obey evacuation orders in the event of a natural disaster. Amann said the letters he is writing to Josephine will hopefully help her beyond emergency preparedness and awareness. He hopes that whatever she chooses to do in life, at the heart of it is a desire to help other people and to be kind.