is emergency management a profession or a function?

You might recall that earlier this year St. Louis had a tornado and an alert and warning was not issued by the emergency management agency of the city. Note, I’ve always warned about “not screwing up a warning.” Well, apparently the city leaders have gone back to an old model of having the fire department be in charge of emergency management for the city.

Todd De Voe wrote the following as a LinkedIn posting. He is right on the money with his assessment. Likely it will be a decade or more before St. Louis ever backs away from the decision they have made. One of my mantra’s has always been—When will an emergency manager be appointed the fire or police chief? We still don’t have a professional identity in the minds of elected officials. Just look at the three temporary appointees that have led the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) since January 20th of this year.

St. Louis: A Troubling Step Backward — And a Deeper Question of Professional Identity

What makes the St. Louis decision especially unsettling is not simply the operational failure or the leadership transition; it is the message it sends about how emergency management is understood as a profession.

In response to recent failures, the city chose to appoint a career firefighter to lead its emergency management agency rather than selecting a credentialed, professionally trained emergency manager. While fire service professionals bring invaluable operational experience, this decision raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: If emergency management can be led by someone outside the profession, should emergency managers then be considered qualified to lead fire departments?

The answer, of course, reveals the imbalance. We would never suggest placing an emergency manager with no fire or command training in charge of a fire department. It would be viewed as irresponsible, even dangerous. Yet the reverse is frequently normalized, reinforcing the notion that emergency management is merely an extension of response services rather than a distinct discipline.

Emergency management is not a subset of firefighting or law. It is a profession requiring expertise in hazard analysis, continuity planning, policy development, intergovernmental coordination, logistics, finance, public information, resilience strategy, and long‑term recovery systems and politics. These are not ancillary skills; they are the core of the discipline. When leadership roles are filled without regard for this professional foundation, it weakens institutional capacity and reinforces an outdated response‑centric model that the field has spent decades trying to outgrow.

The St. Louis decision is not an indictment of firefighters — it is a critique of governance structures that continue to misunderstand emergency management’s role. Firefighters should absolutely be central partners in emergency management systems. But partnership is not the same as substitution.

This choice reflects a broader pattern still visible in too many jurisdictions: emergency management is treated as a secondary function, folded under fire or police, rather than as a strategic coordinating entity in its own right. It is the difference between managing chaos and preventing it.

When leadership is assigned based on convenience or political optics rather than expertise, the risk is not just symbolic — it is operational. Plans go stale. Mitigation gets deferred. Recovery strategies remain reactive. Community resilience suffers quietly until the next crisis exposes the gap.
St.Louis may well stabilize under new leadership. Still, the larger issue remains: if emergency management continues to be seen as a role "any public safety leader can perform," the profession itself will struggle to achieve the recognition and authority necessary to protect communities in an era of increasingly complex risk.