Kris Eide has worked for the Minnesota Department of Public Safety for nearly two decades, serving as director of its office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (HSEM) since 2005. As HSEM director, Eide is responsible for coordination of state agency preparedness and disaster response. Prior to taking over as head of HSEM, Eide served as the state’s assistant director of emergency preparedness and operations. Before joining state government, she worked from 1980 to 1987 for the Greater Minneapolis Area Chapter of the American Red Cross. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology from the University of Minnesota and a master’s degree in management and administration at Metropolitan State University.

Q. What are your responsibilities? What’s a typical day or week like?

A. Our agency is responsible for both the homeland security and emergency management portion for the state. We are the lead agency in coordinating all emergency preparedness, response, and recovery for any kind of hazard, be it natural, technological, or man-made. We’re the (designated federal) State Administrative Agency, so we are the grantee for all of Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding that then gets passed on to the local units of government.

Right now we’re also in the recovery phase of two large disasters. We have the I-35W bridge collapse, and we had the Southeast Minnesota floods. I’m the state coordinating officer for both of those, so I’m dealing with the federal coordinating officer and with the other state agencies and the other federal agencies that are providing recovery programming and funds for those.

Q. What are the state’s top critical infrastructures and threats, natural or man-made?

A. Well, we are an electrical hub. We have a lot of critical infrastructure in that area. We also have the Minneapolis-St. Paul port, as well as Duluth on Lake Superior, and we have quite a few mid-sized chemical facilities. We’re also kind of a financial hub for the upper Midwest, so we have critical infrastructure planners who work with private industry to take a look at their facilities and make sure that they can improve or maintain the security that they need. We also have two nuclear power plants, one on either side of the Minneapolis-St. Paul urban area.

We have the Red River Valley in the north, and the river flows north. Every spring when we have the thaw, the mouth is still frozen but the head is not, so we get serious flooding. We have about 60 percent of our state’s population in the Minneapolis-St. Paul urban area. So that’s always going to be one of our concerns.

Q. Can you describe the day of the I-35W bridge collapse and your involvement?

A. Well, I was notified immediately by the duty officer from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and we immediately activated the state emergency operations center (EOC) in addition to sending folks to the scene.

There is a railway right underneath the I-35W Bridge, and it carries trains with hazardous materials, and there happened to be a train underneath. We weren’t sure what kind of materials were on that train, so we dispatched our hazardous materials technical specialists and our regional coordinating officer to report to the incident commander. We had a joint information center (JIC) that was eventually stood up down there. We sent our public information officers to the scene, and we kept our state EOC here.

We also worked with the state’s intelligence fusion center, the Minnesota Joint Analytical Center (MinnJAC). MinnJAC was already in contact with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which happened to have a camera underneath the bridge, to ascertain that there wasn’t a nexus of terrorism. So that was one of the early things that we did learn was that it was a collapse and wasn’t any kind of terrorism. And they could tell that from the films.

Q. How did your role in the bridge collapse change over time?

A. At the start, the Minneapolis Fire Department was in charge, then after the first 6 to 12 hours, we shifted to unified command, per the National Incident Management System (NIMS). There was unified command for about ten days, including the Fire Department, the state Board of Water and Soil Resources, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department, the State Patrol, the Minneapolis Police Department, and the state Department of Transportation (MinnDOT). Then it became a construction site, and the lead was turned over to MinnDOT.

We shifted into the recovery phase pretty early, so we immediately started looking at addressing fiscal reimbursement issues for local jurisdictions and state agencies. We requested federal declaration of a major disaster, instead it was designated an emergency. FEMA was here, and we had been meeting with the Federal Highway Administration, Minnesota Department of Transportation, and the City of Minneapolis to look at who was going to pay for what. That’s been a lot of our job since the first few days.

Q. What did your agency learn?

A. We learned that we really have a good system here. We started an operating all-hazards incident-command system way back in 1993, so we were very far ahead of many other states and the federal government because we already had our own system that we called Minnesota Emergency Management System (MIMS). So when NIMS became a requirement, it was not that big of a change for us.

We also have a dedicated, interoperable 800 MHz radio system in the metropolitan area, which worked beautifully; we were able to talk cross-discipline, we were able to talk cross-borders.

Q. How has your background helped you on the job?

A. I’ve been doing disaster-related services since 1980. I actually started off a long time ago with the American Red Cross. And from the Red Cross then I came into the Division of Emergency Management in 1987. And since then I’ve worked my way up after I went to the University of Minnesota, and then went for a master’s degree in administration from one of our state universities and then in October 2005 I was appointed to the director’s position. I think I learned a lot from my many years of experience with the Red Cross in that ‘really’ the people come first in any incident. You can’t ever lose sight of the fact that there are people on the other end of the operational activity. And you have to get out there and see this so that you don’t forget what’s going on with people’s lives.

Q. How is the state’s relationship with the federal government?

A. Well I think we have a good working relationship with our regional office of FEMA.  I think there are good, caring people in DHS and in FEMA, but I think it got so big, so fast, with so much pressure from inside, and from Congress, that it’s kind of gotten all mixed up.

Q. Is your agency partnering at all with the private sector?

A. Our critical infrastructure guys work really well with their assigned private industries. Minnesota’s FBI InfraGard program has merged with the Minnesota Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Minnesota ISAC) to form a public-private collaboration that we’re calling the Public-Private Coordination and Action Team (P2CAT).

P2CAT incorporates all the different critical infrastructure sectors, and it establishes an incident coordinator for those sectors and that person is posted to the state EOC during any relevant response. Everyone gets better situational awareness, and we can also help one another with things like resource management.

Q. What is your agency’s goal for the coming year?

A. Our goal is to be prepared for the Republican National Convention being held here September 1-4. We started planning as soon as the state was selected, determining how we were going to coordinate things, even before being designated as a national special security event. The Secret Service is here now, and we’re coordinating with a state-level steering committee and separate working groups.

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