On April 4th, 2025, FEMA issued a press release stating that they were ending the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program, BRIC for short, and canceling all applications from fiscal years 2020 to 2023. If grant funds had not been distributed, they were immediately returned to either the Disaster Relief Fund or the U.S. Treasury. The press release also referred to BRIC as wasteful and politicized. In this episode, Bear Afkhami joins the show to discuss the immediate and long-term repercussions of losing this funding, what could possibly be so political about flood and fire prevention, the importance of pre-disaster mitigation, and what the future may look like without grants like BRIC.

Bear Afkhami is an emergency manager at MPACT Strategic Consulting with 13+ years of experience in prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery. He is also a professor of uncrewed and autonomous technology. He has an MS in Analytics, a BA in Intelligence, and is a graduate of the FEMA National Emergency Management Academy. Bear has numerous credentials, including the FEMA Professional Continuity Practitioner, FEMA Infrastructure Protection, EMT and ACCO Climate Change Professional. He has written articles for public safety publications and regularly presents at emergency management conferences on the topics of mitigation, resiliency, and technology. In 2022, 23 and 24, he presented on drones, artificial intelligence, mitigation, climate change, water and the BRIC program at major conferences such as the National Hurricane Conference, National Resilience Summit, the CyberMaryland Conference, the Texas Emergency Management Conference, as well as the Virginia and Maryland Emergency Management Symposiums. Today, we say goodbye to BRIC (for now) and look to the future of disaster mitigation.

If you're a paid subscriber through stateofdisaster.com, you're listening without ads, either on the site with video and enhanced show notes or on your own private podcast subscription. A percentage of the revenue is going directly to disaster relief. And you get about 10 extra minutes of content this time around, where I asked Bear to put his private sector hat on and approach disaster mitigation as a startup founder. Because in addition to all of his emergency management experience, he's actually written a book called The Startup King. Take 50% off a year-long membership by clicking this link: https://stateofdisaster.substack.com/6fbac94a

• (00:00:00) - Introduction to Emergency Management and BRIC
• (00:07:08) - The Importance of BRIC and Recent Changes
• (00:10:45) - Bipartisan Support and Controversies Surrounding BRIC
• (00:14:49) - Mitigation Strategies and Their Impact
• (00:22:11) - Innovation through BRIC
• (00:27:42) - The Role of Partnerships in Emergency Management
• (00:33:09) - The Asymmetry of Perception
• (00:38:42) - The Cost of Disasters: Beyond Immediate Impact
• (00:39:35) - Bipartisan Communication in Emergency Management
• (00:44:47) - Utilizing 406 Mitigation for Future Preparedness
• (00:46:41) - Integrating Mitigation and Recovery Efforts
• (00:54:20) - Learning from States with Muscle Memory
• (00:57:33) - Self-Reliance of Emergency Managers