Outreach
FEMA Arctic Integrated Emergency Management Course (IEMC)
FEMA's First Arctic Emergency Management Exercise:
Dr. Pennington serves as Homeland Security & Emergency Management Advisor to the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope (ICAS) and helped lead the first-ever FEMA Arctic Integrated Emergency Management Course (IEMC) in Utqiaġvik, September 23–26.
- The course brought together Inupiat community leaders, the ICAS Department of Emergency Management (ICAS-DEM), the North Slope Borough, and the North Slope Borough School District, among others.
- Participants tested response coordination for a simulated typhoon impacting Point Hope (Tikigaq) and a natural gas leak impacting Nuiqsut, strengthening Arctic emergency response coordination and transition-to-recovery capabilities.
Alena Naiden, "As Disasters Grow More Common, an Alaska Tribe is Working to Make the Arctic More Prepared", KNBA, 03 October, 2025
“The outcome is enhancing the communication from all attendees and becoming better at being prepared to respond to different levels of incidences, emergencies that we face within the Arctic that are increasingly occurring,” said Stephanie Nelson, the tribe’s director of emergency management.
“It's using the strength of the Alaska Native communities that are the North Slope to improve emergency management through the lens of Alaska Natives, first and foremost,”said John Pennington, a professor of Homeland Security and Emergency Management at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, an advisor to the tribe and helped put the program together. Pennington said that communities in the Arctic have been seeing intensifying storms and erosion. They also see disasters that federal emergency managers are not familiar with – such as anfor three months across the North Slope. “That doesn't fit into FEMA’s book of what a disaster is, but for us as a community up there, it was a huge disaster,” he said.
