Mike Andrews

Michael (Mike) Andrews is the Principal at GetSet Solutions Ltd, a consulting company that is part of the Strategic Alliance for Emergency Resilience (SAFER) and specializes in emergency management training & exercises. As a former Deputy Director at the tri-municipal North Shore Emergency Management Office (NSEM), Mike was responsible for operational readiness.

 

Mike also spent 8 years with Emergency Management British Columbia (EMBC) as a Regional Manager for the Southwest Region and was City of Vancouver’s Emergency Coordinator before that. In his years with EMBC, Mike was the Chair of the Provincial Emergency Radio Communications Advisory Committee (PERAC) and he held functional portfolios in disaster logistics and critical infrastructure assurance and protection.

 

Mike was heavily involved in public safety planning for the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games and helped design and facilitate the preceding exercises, the largest emergency exercises in Canadian history. Operationally, Mike has worked in all of BC’s six Provincial Regional Emergency Operations Centres (PREOCs), usually as Director and as Planning Chief in the Provincial Emergency Coordination Centre (PECC) in Victoria addressing emergencies and disasters ranging from wildland interface fires and floods to hazardous materials incidents and search and rescue.

 

A self-professed “planner with an operational role and a flair for logistics”, Mike also teaches all of the courses related to Emergency Operations Centres (EOC) at the Justice Institute of BC well as Community Evacuations and Disaster Recovery.  He supported curriculum development or evolution for several of these courses.

 

Mike is an Instructor and Instructor Trainer for ICS Canada in Incident Command System Levels 100, 200 & 300. Mike’s many experiences in emergency management have helped him to realize that most who hold functional roles in municipal emergency operations centres are seconded there for their departmental expertise and they are often out of their element.

 

With this in mind, Mike wrote an academic paper on a concept that he calls “the simplification of emergency management” which uses training and tools that make roles and processes more intuitive, resulting in greater confidence and competence in crisis.