IEM and FEMA Projects

These are federal or federally regulated documents produced through IEM, where I have worked as a technical editor since 2020 and an embedded FEMA contractor from 2021 to 2023. Each involves assembling contributions from many authors into a single internally consistent document—maintaining consistent terminology, resolving contradictions across sections, and ensuring that the document reads as one coherent whole rather than a collection of parts.

North Central Texas EOC Handbook Templates (2020)

Context: IEM, contractor to North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG), 2020

Published: NCTCOG Emergency Preparedness → EOC Handbook Templates

This toolkit comprises three complete sets of Emergency Operations Center handbook templates—covering ICS/ICS-Like, Incident Support Model, and Departmental organizational structures—along with development guides and more than thirty modified ICS forms for each structure. All templates were developed in accordance with NIMS guidance and regional subject-matter expertise for use by emergency management jurisdictions across the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area.

The editorial challenge was consistency at scale across a large suite of operationally interdependent documents: ensuring that terminology, structure, and procedural language were uniform across handbook sets designed for different organizational models, while maintaining the precision that documents used under crisis conditions require. The toolkit was produced in my first year at IEM and has since been adopted and published by NCTCOG for distribution to member jurisdictions.

FEMA Region 10 Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake and Tsunami Plan (January 2023)

Context: IEM, FEMA contractor, 2023

Published: Washington State Military Department → Hazard Plan

This regional emergency operations plan was produced for FEMA Region 10 in preparation for a Cascadia Subduction Zone seismic event, one of the highest-consequence natural disaster scenarios in North America. The document is multi-agency, multi-author, and structured to be used operationally under crisis conditions, where clarity and precision are not abstract virtues but practical requirements.

The editing challenges were structural as much as stylistic: ensuring consistent terminology across authors who wrote independently, maintaining logical flow across sections with different owners, verifying that cross-references and role assignments were internally coherent, and catching claims that subtly contradicted each other across sections. The document had to read as one coherent plan, not a collection of contributions.

Orange County, New York Multi-Jurisdictional Multi-Hazard Mitigation Plan (2025)

Context: IEM Technical Communications Team, contractor to Orange County, NY, 2025

Published: Town of Newburgh, NY Website → Hazard Mitigation Plan (PDF)

At 2,557 pages covering more than twenty participating jurisdictions, this plan represents the largest class of document in my regular editorial practice. Hazard mitigation plans of this scale are produced by assembling dozens of individually authored Word files—written by planners, subject-matter experts, and jurisdiction representatives across the county—into a single unified document, which is then edited for consistency, coherence, and compliance with FEMA formatting and content standards before submission.

The editorial process for hazard mitigation plans is genuinely collaborative: the IEM Technical Communications Team contributes at multiple stages, with different editors taking ownership of different sections and phases. Final quality review of the combined document—checking for terminology drift, broken cross-references, inconsistent role assignments, and formatting compliance—requires one editor to hold the whole in view at once.

The document goes through multiple submission cycles: to the client for review, back to IEM for revisions, to the state for approval, back again, and ultimately to FEMA. FEMA approval is required for jurisdictions to remain eligible for federal hazard mitigation planning grants, which means the accuracy and internal consistency of the document is not an editorial nicety but a condition of federal funding.