Don't miss the opportunity to participate in the Early Edition Speaker Series. This series will be held in October (Tuesdays and Thursdays) and is exclusively for those who register for the IAEM Reimagined Virtual Conference by Sept. 30. The following speakers will be featured: Christa Lopez, Volunteers in Disasters: A Case Study; Camille Crain, The New Building Resilience Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) Program: What Stakeholders Should Know; Errin Henggeler, Collaboration and Goal Alignment: Fostering Partnerships to Better Serve the Community; David Yound, Crowd-Sourced Active Threat Mapping; Susamma Seeley, Bridging EM Practice and Education Through Dialogue: How Conflict Strengthens Diversity for Our Future; John Ford, Benefits of the National Qualification System; Anne Marie McLaughlin and Will Huser, When Worlds Collide: How NYU Managed Impacts from Middle East Tensions and Coronavirus Using Emergency Management and Open Source Analysis Tools; and Alisha King, Cross-Disciplinary Cybersecurity - Education, Empowerment, and the End-User. Register online and receive access to this speaker series.

Sponsorship opportunities are available for IAEM Reimagined: The Virtual Annual Conference. There are options for every budget. Contact Kate McClimans to learn more about reaching IAEM’s audience.

The IAEM Scholarship Program is planning future online auctions to benefit the IAEM scholarship fund and future emergency managers. Items are needed to make the auctions a success. While all item donations are welcome, the Scholarship Commission currently seeks challenge coins and patches. Event challenge coins have been very successful in previous auctions, but all challenge coins are desired. To donate coins, patches or any other items that people would purchase in an auction, email Scholarship Program Director Dawn M. Shiley.

FEMA's National Exercise Division is now accepting nominations to the National Exercise Program (NEP). The program offers no-cost assistance for exercise design, development, execution and evaluation to validate capabilities across all mission areas. Fall nomination round submissions are due by Nov.1 and decisions will be sent by Dec. 1. The NEP will hold additional exercise nomination rounds in spring and fall of 2021. FEMA will host two 60-minute webinars for state, local, tribal, territorial and other whole community partners to discuss the nomination process. The webinars will be held at 2:00 p.m. EDT, Sept. 22 and Oct. 6. The webinar topics also will include the support that NEP can provide for conducting exercises in a COVID-19 environment and the proposed 2021-2022 Principals’ Strategic Priorities. Participate in either webinar by FEMA Teleconference (1-800-320-4330, PIN 559550#) or FEMA Adobe Connect.

FEMA’s National Integration Center is seeking public feedback on four National Incident Management System (NIMS) resource typing definitions. This includes four job resource typing definitions under the emergency medical services core capability: Emergency Medical Responder, Emergency Medical Technician, Emergency Medical Technician – Advanced, and Paramedic. To provide comments on the draft, complete the feedback form and submit the form to fema-nims@fema.dhs.gov by 5:00 p.m. EDT, Oct. 15, 2020.

FEMA and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) developed guidance for federal assistance for the restoration of inundated and submerged roads damaged or destroyed by a declared major disaster. This guidance is from Section 1228 of the Disaster Recovery Reform Act (DRRA) of 2018. FEMA is releasing the current draft policy for a 30-day public comment period. The draft policy and accompanying comments matrix are located on the FEMA website. FEMA will accept public comments until Oct. 14, 2020. FEMA requests that all comments be submitted to FEMA-Recovery-PA-Policy@fema.dhs.gov using the accompanying comments matrix.

The National Hurricane Program support tool, HURREVAC (HURRicane EVACuation), is actively supporting emergency management decisions at many levels during the 2020 hurricane season. HURREVAC provides dynamic hurricane forecast data, advanced and tailored decision support products and reports, high resolution storm surge modeling and exploration, and embedded storm simulations and training. During Hurricane Laura, more than 1,800 emergency managers were simultaneously utilizing HURREVAC to access forecast and timing information. Since the release of the web-based HURREVAC tool, more than 16,000 state, local, tribal, territorial and federal emergency managers have registered for access to the system.

Candidates working toward AEM^® or CEM^® certification will find helpful information about starting the application process in IAEM's Certification Webinar Series. Recordings are available on-demand and provide valuable details about the certification and tips for success.

In an article published in the August 2020 IAEM Bulletin, author Michael Prasad, CEM, described his experiences with FirstNet and invited emergency managers to take a survey about their experiences. He is interested in learning if his experience with FirstNet (so far) is unique or if it’s similar to the experiences of other emergency managers. It’s a short (five indicative, 5 demographic questions) online survey, and Prasad would greatly appreciate your participation, particularly those of you who are new to using FirstNet or if you are currently using FirstNet in some capacity, even if just exploratory/experimental. He is not affiliated with, nor does he represent, IAEM, AT&T, or the FirstNet Authority. He hopes to share the results in a future issue of the IAEM Bulletin. Take the survey here.