EXPERIENCE

ACDC synthesized input from multiple departments, translating diverse operational priorities and functional requirements into a cohesive, countywide COOP. This includes identifying essential functions, orders of succession, delegations of authorities, vital records and systems, and alternate facilities to support continuity under a broad range of hazard scenarios. Throughout the process, ACDC provided technical assistance, facilitated decision-making, and ensured that the final plan aligns with the County’s priorities and nationally recognized standards. 

The resulting COOP will provide Westchester County with a practical, actionable tool for sustaining operations during emergencies and strengthening organizational resilience across departments. 

For the CEMP, ACDC and CMCG engaged all 34 County departments and 17 municipal jurisdictions to identify roles, responsibilities, and emergency response tactics to establish an updated response protocol between the County and its jurisdictions in alignment with FEMA’s Comprehensive Planning Guide 101 and New York States Executive Law 2-B guidelines and national best practices. Departments and jurisdictions attended kickoff meetings and review sessions and collaboratively reviewed drafts to ensure the CEMP aligned with the County’s current response capabilities. 

Coconino County engaged ACDC to develop a disaster-specific Long-Term Recovery Plan (LTRP) that translates immediate fire impacts into a structured, actionable recovery roadmap. The LTRP is grounded in intentional partnership development across federal, Tribal, county, municipal, and private sectors, emphasizing trust, shared governance, and implementation readiness. ACDC is leading robust stakeholder and community engagement, operationalizing the County’s Disaster Recovery Framework through coordinated task forces aligned with key recovery areas including economic revitalization, health and social services, and natural/cultural resource protection. 

ACDC’s scope includes facilitating community and Tribal listening sessions, documenting stakeholder input in real time, and converting qualitative concerns into grant-ready recovery priorities. These engagement efforts reflect the broad community interest in shaping recovery: County leaders have hosted nine in-person public meetings across affected areas to gather insight for the LTRP, a process that garnered media attention from Fox10 News Phoenix, highlighting the County’s efforts to solicit wide public input on recovery needs and priorities. Through this structured yet adaptive engagement and task force coordination model, the LTRP addresses tourism losses, workforce housing strain, and cultural resource protection – while defining roles, responsibilities, timelines, and alignment with funding pathways. 

By using recovery planning as a collaborative mechanism, the project is enhancing cross-jurisdictional coordination, strengthened trust among partners, and created clarity around recovery governance – turning a complex wildfire aftermath into coordinated, community-driven recovery action. 

The project was executed in three phases. It began with a planning meeting to validate the work plan, define key stakeholders, establish focus areas, and confirm the timeline. ACDC then reviewed all relevant plans and operational materials used during the incident, including the EOP, IAPs, situation reports (Sitreps), and existing AARs from partner agencies. A secure SharePoint/Teams collaboration site was created to facilitate efficient document sharing.

In the second phase, ACDC conducted a thorough analysis of the documents to understand the roles, responsibilities, and capabilities of responding entities. Over 40 individual interviews followed this, held both in person and virtually, with key personnel and agency representatives involved in the response. These interviews helped establish core themes, validate findings, and shape the improvement recommendations.

The final phase focused on consolidating insights into an annotated outline and draft report, which incorporated stakeholder feedback. ACDC then facilitated an in-person After-Action Meeting (AAM) to validate key findings and gain consensus on the improvement plan matrix. EGS personnel played a pivotal role in the data collection, key personnel interview process and the development and final reviews of the report. The final AAR was delivered professionally formatted and compliant with federal accessibility standards.

Despite the challenge of a compressed timeline, our team adapted quickly by offering flexible scheduling, prioritizing early engagement, and leveraging virtual tools to accommodate participants. This approach ensured timely and accurate information collection while maintaining momentum throughout the project. The result was a high-quality, actionable AAR that met all deliverable requirements and provided MEMA with critical insights to strengthen future emergency management capabilities.

We developed a draft methodology to estimate daily and weekly emergency potable water needs for the region, taking into account the scale of outages, population demographics, and specific water quality targets. ACDC also identified and mapped available resources for water supply and delivery, conducted a gap analysis, and proposed strategies to address the identified gaps. 

Our work culminated in the delivery of a robust, actionable framework that includes regional policy recommendations, with a particular emphasis on ensuring water provision for vulnerable populations. ACDC also conducted stakeholder trainings and a workshop exercise to test and refine the framework, ensuring that all planning assumptions, guidelines, and policy recommendations were thoroughly vetted. The final framework was delivered in both draft and final versions, providing the Portland Metropolitan Region with a vital tool to ensure safe and effective emergency water distribution across multiple jurisdictions. 

ACDC worked directly with city, state, and federal staff post Hurricane-Michael to develop a resiliency and recovery plan for the City of Mexico Beach. As a component of the plan, ACDC staff performed a vulnerability assessment based on hazard identification, observed damages, wind maps, flood exposure and priority risk assessment. Once all vulnerabilities had been assessed, our staff performed an analysis of City infrastructure to determine adaptive capacity for mitigation and resiliency, existing resiliency actions already implemented, and developed an implementation plan for resiliency and mitigation options for future projects.  ACDC also assisted the City with synthesizing stakeholder planning goals and objectives as well as facilitating public workshops and outreach sessions to get maximum public and local stakeholder input. Projects identified through this process for implementation in the Resiliency and Recovery Plan included regional stormwater detention and management, wastewater bypass pumping, jetty improvements involving sand bypassing, flood control, and hardened emergency facilities for police and fire.   

ACDC also performs Certified Floodplain Management services on an as needed basis to provide flood plain plan review and maintain compliance with the adopted codes, ordinances, and all the associate referenced standards, rules, statutes.