Costa Mesa ER preparedness guru retires after long sharing her passion for protection
After nearly two decades of hoping for the best but planning for the worst, Costa Mesa’s disaster preparedness guru is hanging up her safety vest.
Brenda Emrick, who came to the city as a fire protection specialist in 2004 and has since overseen and developed public safety training programs for students, business owners, community members and civic leaders alike — retired on Dec. 31.
The retirement is technically Emrick’s second. She retired from her specialist’s role on July 12 but was brought back on a temporary contract to serve as Costa Mesa’s acting emergency services manager while officials recruited to fill the job permanently.
“It’s just confusing,” the 60-year-old joked Wednesday from her home in Placentia. “I kind of already retired. But we didn’t do any announcement because I was coming back almost the next day.”
Costa Mesa Fire Chief Dan Stefano said placing Emrick in the temporary role allowed city officials to conduct a thorough search for someone to head the city’s preparedness efforts while benefiting from Emrick’s expertise and passion for protection.
“She has brought into that position an unbelievably phenomenal energy,” Stefano said. “Sometimes, when someone retires, that institutional knowledge is lost. That is not the case with Brenda, and that speaks to what she is all about.”
Since graduating from high school in 1981, Emrick has served three cities — Downey, where she grew up, the city of La Mirada and Costa Mesa. She started out working part time for Downey’s parks and recreation department. The exposure to local programs and city constituents served her well.
“I tell everyone when you start out in parks and community services, you learn customer service in a completely different way,” Emrick said. “You can do anything [from there].”
As a community service leader in La Mirada in 1988, Emrick helped establish an educational gang-intervention program for elementary school students called “Positive Alternatives,” which still operates to this day.
When the city of La Mirada allowed a cohort of employees to receive sheriff department training so they could man a law enforcement substation, Emrick began overseeing local neighborhood watch efforts on top of her duties as an educational program leader and came to be known as “Officer Brenda.”
“I was not law enforcement with a gun, but law enforcement with a pen and paper,” she said of the job, which also involved talking to schools about fire safety.
The progression to public safety officer allowed Emrick to transition back to Downey, first as a 911 fire dispatcher and later as an emergency services coordinator, from 2001 to 2004.
When she came to Costa Mesa, she applied her considerable energy to building the city’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) program, which trains volunteers to assist first responders in the event of a disaster or emergency.
Hundreds received training, as Emrick worked with counterparts in other cities to create a countywide CERT mutual aid program, where trained volunteers could be deployed as needed. The network made great strides in area wildfires in 2007 and 2008 and was recognized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency .
“They became this trusted source of human power,” she recalled.
Emrick was called upon by FEMA to train others to lead their own CERT programs, an effort that would take her in 2015 on six trips to China and later to Laos.
Whether in Costa Mesa or Chengdu, China, Emrick said she hoped to impart to citizens just how impacted the usual channels of help could possibly be in a disaster and how crucial it will be for them to educate themselves in the basics.
“I prepare so people understand the limits the city will have. On a great day, we’re there, but on a bad day, we’re limited,” she added. “We have to have a plan B and a C — and maybe a D.”
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