The Authors — The Emergency Management Field Guide

Co-Author

Ryan Steele

CEM · PMP · CBCP · M-MEMS

Emergency management found Ryan through service — first in the Texas State Guard, then across county, state, and now municipal government. He has worked disaster response and recovery from more angles than most: deployed to Harris County in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey supporting a team credited with 1,400 rescues, coordinated Texas’s COVID recovery efforts including the Fair Park mass vaccination site, and built statewide performance-tracking systems for TDEM using Smartsheet, Power BI, and ArcGIS.

Today he is the Response and Recovery Coordinator for the City of Richardson, Texas, where he runs EOC operations, builds training and exercise programs, and keeps the systems in place that let a city respond well when things go wrong. Before that, he covered preparedness planning, county liaison work for TDEM, and recovery grant administration in the field.

He holds the CEM, PMP, CBCP, and M-MEMS certifications, chairs the IAEM Emerging Technology Caucus, and is finishing his MBA at Mays Business School, Texas A&M. He recently co-authored The Emergency Management Field Guide: Leading Through Chaos and Calm, built from real incident experience rather than theory.

Outside of EM, he co-owns Native Texas Craftsman Company, a custom woodworking business, and has been an Eagle Scout and active in Scouting America for most of his life.

Co-Author

Sarah Haak

MBA · MSHSM

Sarah has spent 20+ years in emergency management across every level of government and the private sector. From federal policy at DHS, to state field response with TDEM, to county-level planning and operations at Kaufman County OEM, to her current role supporting disaster response and preparedness across FEMA Region 6, she has worked the full stack of emergency management from the ground up.

That breadth matters. She has activated EOCs, coordinated shelter missions for tens of thousands of Hurricane Harvey evacuees, managed COVID-19 responses exceeding 300 days of continuous activation, and briefed senior officials during some of Texas’s most complex incidents. She also brings private-sector discipline — financial management, project operations, and stakeholder strategy — into everything she does in the public sector.

Her expertise spans emergency planning, disaster response and recovery, grant management, stakeholder coordination, training and exercises, and policy development. She has responded to more than a dozen federally declared disasters and as many state and local incidents, from tornadoes and hurricanes to protests, cyberattacks, and pandemics.

Strong emergency management starts before the storm. She is as committed to building community resilience and local capacity as she is to leading response when it counts.

She is a proud recipient of the 2018 National NextGen Public Service Award for Leadership, a Texas House of Representatives flag for service to the region, and multiple NCTCOG Regional Excellence Awards.