I then joined the Maine State Hazardous Materials Response Team and was happy to be able to apply my engineering skills to, well, chaos. That’s an important takeaway. It turns out that many things in life and business are really just finding solutions to bring order to chaos. In emergency response, much like on a boat, you have to find the solutions quickly and be bold enough to apply them immediately. Otherwise, chaos quickly turns to crisis.

At some point wisdom set in and I realized that screeching out on snowy roads in the middle of the night to climb onto a rolled over, ice covered, tank truck full of trioxydiplexiscarystuff to cut a hole in it is a job for someone with more youth and vigor. I also learned along the way that pre-planning was a critical part of a successful emergency response; it was time to go back to school. Emergency management is a poorly named profession since the primary function of an emergency management agency is planning for emergencies rather than managing them. Naming discrepancies aside, emergency management seemed to be my path so off  I went to Massachusetts Maritime Academy and earned a Master of Science in Emergency Management.

Avoiding crisis is what I’m about now. Chaos leads to crisis. Planning prevents chaos. So, by the transitive property, planning prevents crisis.