Springfield, IL (CAPITOL CITY NOW) – Proper prior planning is what emergency management is all about, says the deputy director of Illinois’ Office of Emergency Management, part of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and Office of Homeland Security.

“We just did a significant amount of planning for the Democratic National Convention, making sure that we would be ready in case Chicago had a really bad day for some reason. For over a year we were doing interagency planning with federal, state, and local partners to make sure we would be ready in that case,” says Clayton Kuetemeyer. “The key tenet was that we were ready.”

A just-concluded emergency management summit included reflections from those who handled the Maui wildfires. While Illinois is not necessarily considered a wildfire state, “those lessons (of organization and integration) can translate from different kinds of disasters and apply, in some cases, to an urban flooding response.”