Today's episode is incredible and as usual, has nothing to do with anything that I did. It just happens that my guest, Brenden Winder, is a fantastic emergency manager and human.

Brenden Winder is the head of emergency management at Christchurch City Council in New Zealand with two decades of experience in the sector. He's played a pivotal role in the response and recovery efforts following the 2010-11 Canterbury earthquakes, particularly in managing the Christchurch Red Zone. He's heavily involved in enhancing New Zealand's emergency management frameworks, focusing on tsunami risk, evacuation planning, and the use of AI in emergency management. He's deployed domestically and internationally and has co-authored emergency management documents as well. I know you'll enjoy this episode and I look forward to talking to Brenden again.

I'm going to call this Universal Lessons in Disaster Management because I think if Brenden wrote a book about everything we discussed, it would be one of those mandatory reads for the field, because it's so applicable.

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On this episode that we recorded on my favorite day of the year, Star Wars Day, I'm joined by the incredible Ginny Katz. Ginny is the founder and CEO of HazAdapt, a safety app and platform transforming how communities prepare for and adapt to hazards.

Ginny is a Spitfire of research, innovation, and ethics on a mission to build a new era of emergency and safety technology that responsibly supports bottom-up resilience and top-down engagement throughout a disaster. At the front of community resilience innovation, Ginny and the HazAdapt team are redefining how people and communities engage with safety information and discovering online and offline insights critical for local emergency managers and preparedness authorities.

Paid subscribers on stateofdisaster.com get to see the extended version of this interview with a demo of the NEW ResiliencePoint feature that shows emergency managers how their community is interacting with hazard guidance, revealing trends, gaps, and opportunities to strengthen resilience. You also get to see me have an allergy attack mid-recording! FUN!

You can access the HazAdapt app directly for free by clicking here!

A conversation with Brandy Mai, a practitioner of emergency management, public information, and law.

Brandy Mai is a U.S. Army veteran who was born and raised in deep south Louisiana. She is also an attorney and an emergency management consultant who's worked extensively in communications and public information, helping multiple organizations and agencies navigate their crisis and disaster strategies.

Her professional experience includes work in military and government, corporate, nonprofit, emergency management, homeland security, and public safety sectors, including a position as lead public information officer for a state emergency management agency. In her spare time, Brandy is an advocate for veterans, children, disabled persons, marginalized populations, and persons with mental health diagnoses. She and her four kids reside in Savannah, Georgia.

This is a long episode because there's so much that we could talk about, but Brandy will be back to chat again. am sure if you're listening or watching on stateofdisaster.com, you're experiencing the whole episode with video and without ads. Your subscription is also directly supporting disaster relief. If you'd like to join me on the show, advertise or submit a disaster story for me to tell on your behalf, you can reach me at matt@stateofdisaster.com