Montana Disaster Services reports massive turnover since ‘22 flood

Employee housing in Yellowstone River during the 2022 Yellowstone River flood. (Photo by Gina Riquier/Courtesy of Yellowstone National Park)

Montana Disaster and Emergency Services said it has seen 60% staff turnover in the two years since the Yellowstone River flood and asked lawmakers Tuesday for 14 more full-time employees.

Administrator for the Disaster and Emergency Services Division Delila Bruno told legislators the staff losses are in part due to burnout, and most often they lose employees to the private sector after training them.

Legislators are looking into disaster and emergency service recovery response in Montana as part of a study bill passed in the last legislative session. Lawmakers in a subcommittee of the State Administration and Veterans’ Affairs Interim Committee will eventually have to draft recommendations for how to improve emergency response in the state.

Department suggestions beyond staff increases included enhancing recovery coordination between agencies pre-disaster, training state experts to provide damage assessments to reduce reliance on federal partners, developing a statewide debris management plan and increasing staffing to assist individual assistance post-disaster.

In June of 2022, the Yellowstone River flooded in a 500-year event with nearly 10 inches of rain and snowmelt in 24 hours, destroying homes and structures along the river and sections of northern roads leading into Yellowstone National Park from gateway towns. The event required a massive recovery effort.

In the past 12 years, Montana has made 50 statewide disaster declarations and 15 federal declarations, including the 2022 flood, Bruno said. The recovery team, which works to restore a community to pre-disaster conditions, has six open disasters it is working on – half of which are floods.

She said federal resources for recovery efforts significantly outweigh what’s available at the state and local level. It would be better to reduce the reliance on the federal government to get communities back on their feet, she said, and may allow for a faster response.

Rep. Kelly Kortum, D-Bozeman, proposed writing a bill to provide emergency services with the additional 14 staff members, but other lawmakers shot the idea down as premature and wanted to hear from other stakeholders first.

Bruno said in an example of how the department loses staff, if they trained someone up to be a floodplain manager, then they suddenly became incredibly marketable for disaster firms for nationwide projects.

“They pay way more than we do,” Bruno said. “That’s very, very common to see people get gobbled up in the private sector and work nationally.”

The legislature gave staff raises during the last legislative session, which Bruno said has been a huge help in retention. She said getting more employees to share in the workload could also help with burnout.

Bruno said there also needs to be an emphasis on hiring for different skill sets in the division, and said they need more grant writers and people who understand local policies.

“What is appealing to a lot of emergency managers that we have apply for these positions is that they still associate the work with kind of a first-responder type work,” she said.

She said the division is looking to develop a certification program to train people on the recovery aspect of the job and the more administrative side of the division, which she said is the bulk of their work, though there are opportunities for first responders as well.

“We want to make sure that whether you’re at the local level or you’re at the state level, when you take a job with disaster emergency services, it’s clear what your what your job really is,” she said.

Bruno said Montana needs to increase support for local communities to be able to respond and recover from disasters.

“We know we need more training at both the state and local levels,” she said. “We do know that Montana communities do a better job when they have the resources at their fingertips.”

The SAVA sub-committee did not take action Tuesday, but will meet with the full interim committee on May 23.

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