BRYAN, Texas — For some time, TEEX has been known as a resource to train for disaster management and recovery.
Their mission has always been pretty cut and dry, but in an unprecedented pandemic, comes a new crisis that they’re attacking head on.
“Principally, it’s a lot of disaster financing and accounting. So the challenge there is a lot of local governments, since they’re not used to dealing with disasters every month, they’re really struggling with getting those funds recovered. This course helps them be better prepared to do that,” said Andrew Wenzel, the Program Director of Infrastructure Training and Safety Institute for Disaster Recovery.
TEEX saw some confusion during Hurricane Harvey and formed the Disaster Recovery Awareness course that’s available now online, for free.
“Its open to everybody. So they can go to the website and enroll. If you're somebody who works in it, it’s all the more important that you take it,” Wenzel said.
During any kind of disaster, there’s a lot of bureaucratic red tape involved with getting funding for an area whose businesses and infrastructure have been struggling.
TEEX is hoping to guide city leaders and middle management in the right direction for recovery.
Wenzel said, “Cities have to follow their own rules as well as FEMA’s and state rules. So it gets to be quite a bit of information for folks who don’t train and practice in it.”
The course is actually just a few hours long, with takeaways that can lead to some long term good for your area.
“One of them is to really marshal and give support to the administrative and finance side of the operation. Because the amount of spending is very significant,” he said, “we tend to focus our mind on firemen and people saving lives. And that’s terribly important it really is. Every community is involved in this now. If we don’t do the paperwork, we’ll end up in a fiscal predicament.”