Dale Kowalski has been in emergency management for seventeen years, the last eight as Emergency Management Coordinator for a Great Lakes county of about 140,000 people. Before that, he spent a decade as a volunteer firefighter. We spoke in his office on a Wednesday afternoon in November, between what he called "flood season" and "ice storm season," though he noted those categories don't mean what they used to. The conversation kept circling back to a question that clearly bothers him: what exactly is his job anymore?
Dale exists in that useful gray area between real and representative—the kind of composite character journalists construct when the truth is too diffuse to hang on one actual person, but too important to leave abstract. Think of him as the emergency manager you'd meet in any mid-sized county in the Midwest, if that emergency manager was willing to say the quiet parts out loud.
You've been doing this almost two decades. What's changed?
The frequency, obviously. When I started, we'd have one, maybe two significant events a year that required county-level coordination. Last year we had eleven. This year we're at nine and we've got six weeks left.
But it's not just frequency. The events themselves don't... resolve anymore. We had a flood in 2019. Normal protocol is you respond, you recover, you write the after-action report, you update the plan, you move on. Except the flood damaged infrastructure that we couldn't afford to fully repair before the next flood hit in 2021. So now we're in this perpetual state of partial recovery. The emergency never quite ends before the next one starts.
My predecessor—guy who trained me—he used to say the job was about preparing for the big one. The catastrophic event that would test everything. Now? The catastrophic event is just gestures vaguely this. All of this. Continuous.
How do you plan for continuous emergency?
You don't. Not really.
Our planning documents are built around something called a Hazard Identification and Vulnerability Analysis. You look at historical data—what's happened in your area, how often, how severe—and you plan accordingly. Hundred-year flood means it happens once a century, so you prepare at that level.
Except we've had three hundred-year floods in the last seven years. At what point do we stop calling it a hundred-year flood and start calling it a Tuesday?
He laughs, but it's the laugh of someone who's told this joke too many times to find it funny anymore.
The planning cycle is five years. We're supposed to review and update every five years based on emerging threats. But climate change operates on, what, seventy-five to a hundred-year timescales? How am I supposed to plan for 2075 when my budget only covers 2026 and I need to give my county commissioners hard numbers, not probability ranges?
Climate scientists will tell you there's a 40 to 60 percent chance of X happening by Y date, plus or minus fifteen years. That's honest! That's good science! But try putting that in a budget request. "We need $2.3 million for flood mitigation that might be necessary sometime between 2032 and 2047, with moderate confidence."
You know what the commissioners say? "Come back when you have real numbers."
What about the federal guidance? FEMA has climate resources now.
Climate Essentials for Emergency Managers. Yeah, I've read it.1 It's fine. It's helpful for understanding climate science basics. But it doesn't solve my actual problem, which is that my job description is becoming obsolete in real-time.
Emergency management is built around the concept of emergency. Acute events. Things that have a beginning, middle, and end. Hurricane makes landfall, you respond, you recover, you return to normal. That's the model.
But when does "emergency" become "business as usual"?
We're supposed to be focused on extreme events—hurricanes, major floods, severe winter storms. But those events aren't extreme anymore. They're just what happens. So either everything is an emergency, which means nothing is, or we need a new word for what we do.
Have you found that new word?
Long pause.
No. And I don't think my profession has either. We're still using the old language because we don't know what else to call it. "Emergency preparedness" sounds ridiculous when you're preparing for something that's already happening and will keep happening.
Some of my colleagues have started using "climate adaptation coordinator" or "resilience manager." Those sound nice. Very forward-thinking. But they don't capture what we actually do, which is show up when the shit hits the fan and try to keep people alive.
You mentioned the Canadian Armed Forces adding sandbag tests to their fitness exams.
Laughs genuinely for the first time.
Yeah! Because they're getting called out so often for flood response that sandbag stacking is now a core military skill.2 It's darkly hilarious. It's also terrifying. When the military is training for disaster response as a primary function, not a secondary one, that tells you something about where we're headed.
We're seeing the same thing at the county level. I used to have mutual aid agreements with three neighboring counties—we'd help each other out during major events. Now all four of us are dealing with events simultaneously. We're exhausting our resources at the same time. So we're calling in state resources more often, and the state is calling in federal resources more often, and eventually you run out of cavalry.
Last summer we had a severe storm that knocked out power for 40,000 residents. Normally we'd request support from the state emergency management agency. But they were dealing with wildfires in the north and flooding in the south. So we just made do. Longer response times. More people suffering. That's the new normal.
How do you explain this to your team?
I don't, really. They're living it. They see the same thing I do.
But morale is complicated. You get into this work because you want to help people during their worst moments. There's meaning in that. Purpose. But when the worst moments never stop, when you're running from one disaster to the next without time to breathe, people burn out.
I've lost three good people in the last two years. One retired early. Two left for private sector jobs. And I get it—I really do. The adrenaline can only carry you so far. Eventually you need to feel like you're making progress, like things are getting better.
But things aren't getting better. They're getting worse, and we all know it.
The younger folks coming in now, they have a different mindset. They grew up with climate change as a given. They're not mourning the old model the way I am. But they're also more likely to ask hard questions about whether this is sustainable, whether emergency management as a profession has a future.
Does it?
Another long pause.
I think we'll always need people who coordinate disaster response. But I think the job is going to look fundamentally different in ten years. Less about preparing for the big one, more about managing chronic stress on systems. Less about response, more about... I don't know, managed decline? That sounds terrible, but it's kind of accurate.
Like, we have neighborhoods in the floodplain that have flooded four times in six years. At some point, the honest conversation is: should people live there? Should we be spending money to rebuild infrastructure that's going to flood again? But I can't say that publicly. My job is to help people stay safe where they are, not tell them to leave.
There's this weird tension where everyone knows certain areas are becoming unlivable, but nobody with authority will say it out loud. So we keep writing emergency plans for places that probably shouldn't have emergency plans because they should have evacuation plans.
What would help?
Laughs bitterly.
Money. Realistic timelines. Permission to tell the truth.
But seriously—if I could change one thing, it would be getting everyone on the same page about what we're actually dealing with. Right now I'm supposed to write plans based on historical data that I know is meaningless. I'm supposed to prepare for events that climate models say will be different from anything we've seen. I'm supposed to give commissioners certainty when the science offers probability ranges.
The cognitive dissonance is exhausting. I spend half my time translating climate science into emergency management language, and the other half translating emergency management needs into budget language, and somewhere in the middle the actual work of keeping people safe gets squeezed.
Do you ever think about leaving?
Every few months. Usually after a particularly bad event or a frustrating budget meeting. But then something happens—a successful evacuation, a family we helped, a piece of infrastructure we managed to protect—and I remember why I do this.
He pauses, looking at the wall where he's pinned maps showing flood zones, evacuation routes, and shelter locations.
I think what keeps me here is the same thing that makes it hard: I know what's coming. I've seen the models. I've read the projections. And I can't shake the feeling that someone needs to be here, doing this work, even if the work itself is changing into something we don't have a name for yet.
Maybe I'm naive. Maybe I'm just the guy rearranging deck chairs. But until someone tells me to stop, I'm going to keep showing up and doing what I can. Even if what I can do keeps shrinking.
What do you tell people who ask for advice about emergency preparedness now?
I tell them the truth: prepare for more of everything. More heat, more storms, more floods, more power outages. Have a go-bag. Know your evacuation routes. Check on your neighbors. All the standard stuff.
But I also tell them something I never used to say: prepare for this to be your life now. Not a temporary emergency, but the conditions you're living in. That changes the calculation.
You're not surviving the disaster and getting back to normal. You're building a life that can handle this level of disruption continuously.
That's a darker message than I'm comfortable giving, honestly. But people deserve the truth, even when it's uncomfortable.
He glances at his phone, where a weather alert is flashing.
Speaking of which—looks like we've got ice storm potential this weekend. So I should probably get back to work. Whatever "work" means anymore.