Guest column by HERO Deputy Director Catherine Harrison
We in public health emergency preparedness often note that our work of preparing for and responding to emergencies is very much in the background, or “behind the curtain.” In fact, we find that most of the general public is unaware that emergency preparedness is a core function of governmental public health and can be found in nearly every health department across the country, with a few exceptions. When a crisis hits the light may shine upon some aspects of our work, such as pandemic response or emergency shelters; but even then, the emergency preparedness team is in the background, supporting those who are delivering service and care.
So what are we doing back here, anyway? Unfortunately, we have a recent, real life response that can share a peek behind the curtain on our work.
Wednesday, August 27, 2025 is a day I don’t want to remember but will never forget, when a shooter attacked children, teachers, and parishioners at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. In the days and weeks following, our MRC Disaster Behavioral Health team deployed to support the Annunciation community, which you can read about in the MRC Newsletter. But for our HERO staff, our actions began immediately to be ready to respond.
The first part to initiating any response is understanding the situation, at least as best as possible in the moment. Like many others on August 27th, our team checked news updates and social media posts, but we also relied on alert systems specific to emergency management and first responders. These systems allowed us to have accurate information about the number of people impacted and severity of injuries or fatalities.
As we began to anticipate that our MRC would be needed to support the Annunciation community, we moved into active preparation to respond, including:
- Obtaining pre-approval from University leadership to deploy MRC members should there be a formal request.
- Developing a Deployment Plan based on the specific request and the resources we have available (in this case, licensed mental health providers).
- Preparing our DBH Team Leads to activate the deployment plan, assessing availability, and placing all DBH team members on standby.
- “Turning on” the systems and operations to run a deployment if needed. This includes things like documentation, schedule set ups, identifying the supplies and materials that would be needed, and more.
- Determining and communicating anticipated roles for our HERO staff within a deployment.
- Maintaining communication and situational awareness with response partners.
All of these actions and postures happened within a few hours of learning about the shooting at Annunciation school, even though we didn’t receive an official request for support through a predetermined chain of command until 2 days later. This highlights another overarching aspect of this work: We must often move easily between feelings of “hurry up and wait” and “wait, wait, wait, go!” This is a natural and inevitable aspect of dealing with uncertain and quickly evolving situations, but what we do behind the curtain to prepare can make or break our ability to meet those moments, move efficiently between postures, and respond to the needs of our communities in times of crisis.