Butterworth Speaks to Toccoa Rotary Club

The head of Georgia’s Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency, more commonly known as GEMA, stops in Toccoa.

Jim Butterworth spoke on Tuesday to the Toccoa Rotary Club at its weekly meeting on the campus of Toccoa Falls College about his agency and its role in the operations of state government.

Butterworth said while most people associate his agency with its traditional role in emergency management, the state added homeland security responsibilities several years ago.

“We are a lot more than the agency that responds to a snow or an ice storm,” said Butterworth. “The legislature and the Governor changed the name of our agency to the Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency of Georgia. I think that is definitely in context with what we do. We have a lot of folks all over the state of Georgia that are engaged directly to prevent, to mitigate any time of threat, man-made or natural, and then, good Lord willing, it does not happen. But if it does, they are capable and willing to respond and recover and help communities get back to normal.”

Butterworth said that there are five parts to what his agency does.

They are prevention, preparation, mitigation, response, and recovery.

He said while most people think about the response and recovery parts, the first three, prevention, preparation, and mitigation are just as, if not more, important.

“Some folks think that emergency management does not really do anything until it comes time for a response and recovery,” said Butterworth. “As we sit here, right below Toccoa Falls and everybody knows what happened a long time ago on this very location, the response and recovery was critical. But, if the preparation is not there beforehand, then everything else will not flow. The thing we say all the time is you cannot trade business cards with the other first responders as soon as the event happens. If you are doing that, you are already extremely late.”

Butterworth also talked about the different areas that Georgia’s Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency deals with.

They include everything from snowstorms and hurricanes to cybersecurity, health issues like the Zika virus, and terrorism issues.