Emergency Management of Colorado

Emergency Management of Colorado

Operational emergency management for local, state, and federal partners.

The firm plans, coordinates, and supports incident operations for public agencies — work that has to hold up under scrutiny and in the field.

Capabilities Contact

Capabilities

The work

The practice covers the full cycle of emergency management and the specialized functions that sit beside it.

  • Emergency management planning

    Preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation planning, including continuity of operations (COOP) and continuity of government (COG) plans at the local, state, and federal levels.

  • Incident operations

    Support for operations under the National Incident Management System (NIMS), in emergency operations centers, and on incident management teams — across disciplines and levels of government.

  • ESF #13 and public safety

    Support for ESF #13, the public safety and security Emergency Support Function, along with related law-enforcement coordination, physical security planning, and counter-terrorism planning.

  • Exercises and special events

    Exercise design and delivery, special-event public safety planning, and capability-improvement plans for agencies and organizations.

  • Healthcare emergency management

    Emergency management programs and plans for healthcare organizations, written to applicable hospital and clinical emergency-management standards, along with clinical and emergency-medicine preparedness.

  • Hazardous materials and CBRNE

    Planning and preparedness for hazardous materials and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNE) threats, including mass decontamination and personal protective equipment.

Approach

Standards matter. So does the organization that has to live with the result.

Effective emergency management respects both doctrine and the people who have to carry it out. The firm works within recognized standards, including the National Incident Management System, and adapts methods to the culture, authorities, and processes of the agency it supports. The aim is a plan, an exercise, or an operation that people can actually run.

The principals’ combined experience spans emergency management, homeland security, law enforcement, emergency nursing, and hazardous materials response. That mix is useful when an incident does not respect organizational charts.

About

The principals

Emergency Management of Colorado is led by Alan Colon and Wendy Colon.

Principal

Alan Colon, MBA

Alan Colon is a principal of Emergency Management of Colorado. He holds a Master of Business Administration from Regis University and a Bachelor of Science in Management from DeVry University.

Since 2012 he has served as a regional field coordinator for ESF #13 — the public safety and security Emergency Support Function — in the Rocky Mountain states of Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. In that role he writes and maintains multi-state emergency plans consistent with the National Incident Management System (NIMS), plans and directs exercises, and works with state emergency-management agencies and federal law-enforcement partners. He has deployed to 40 federal disasters since 2012, including the 2013 Colorado floods and Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria.

He served as president of the Colorado Emergency Management Association from 2018 to 2022, after serving as vice president and treasurer.

From 2002 to 2012 he was Commerce City, Colorado’s first Emergency Management Director, creating the Office of Emergency Management from scratch. He created Colorado’s first law-enforcement-based incident management team. He also served as a police officer with the Commerce City Police Department.

From 1995 to 2010 he served with the National Disaster Medical System in the command staff of the Colorado Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT CO-2) and the National Medical Response Team for Weapons of Mass Destruction (Central). He taught hazardous materials and weapons of mass destruction response to police, fire, emergency medical, hospital, and public health personnel at the Colorado BNICE Training Center. He later served on the board of the Denver Urban Area Security Initiative and led the region’s first-responder credentialing program.

He is a State of Colorado Incident Command System instructor for ICS 100 through ICS 400, and an instructor in hazardous materials and weapons of mass destruction response, medical care, personal protective equipment, and decontamination through Denver Health.

Principal

Wendy Colon, RN, BSN, MBA

Wendy Colon is a principal of Emergency Management of Colorado. She is a registered nurse with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and a Master of Business Administration. She has served as an emergency department director and has practiced trauma nursing for forty years. She holds Emergency Nurses Association provider credentials in the Trauma Nursing Core Course (TNCC) and the Emergency Nursing Pediatric Course (ENPC).

She is a former commander of Colorado’s Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT CO-2), a federal team of the National Disaster Medical System under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response. She also commanded the National Medical Response Team for Weapons of Mass Destruction (Central), an NDMS team organized to provide mass decontamination and emergency medical care during hazardous-materials and weapons-of-mass-destruction incidents.

She is a weapons of mass destruction specialist and a hazardous materials technician. She served as incident commander during the COVID-19 response and directed the mass vaccination clinic in Brighton, Colorado.

Contact

Professional inquiries

The firm can be reached by email.