Sep 9, 2026 · 20 min · 7 segments
How do communities prepare for disasters they hope never happen? Meet the emergency planners, business leaders, and volunteers building resilience before the first siren sounds. Learn more about your…
Persia Payne HurleyGuest
This preparedness thing we talk about, it kind of sounds like it's a noun, but it's kind of a verb.
That's Persia Payne Hurley, Assistant Director for Partnership Engagement at with North Carolina Emergency Management.
It's a long way of saying she's a disaster preparedness and resilience expert whose work explores how planning, trust, and local partnerships help communities grow stronger before they're ever put to the test.
Can you just explain what you think when people use the phrase preparedness?
This thing we call preparedness, it grows with the lessons that we learn after each disaster.
It grows with new technologies and the new needs that emerge from from this ever-changing world that we have.
And for my state in 2023, we weren't concerned with earthquake-level type impacts in North Carolina.
And those lessons, as an example, have stepped up our activities to prepare because now we understand the difference between what is a emergency, what's a disaster, and what's a catastrophic level of event in our state.
I think that a great way to describe me when I started this job was I was going 100 miles per hour because all I could think of is the storm's coming and it's coming and holy cow, there's a million things to do and trying to prioritize that because it can come up on you at any time.
If you had to think of a calendar, our hurricane season, for instance, which is the highest threat in North Carolina, it's from June the 1st until November the 30th, technically.
But what we do is we begin preparing for the next season, even when we're in season.
Right now, we're facing the height of our season, which is usually September, October, believe it or not.
Well, right this moment, we may be considering something that occurred to us that would be a great thing to do to be prepared, but we realize we're probably out of time to put it into action.
But we will do that planning and kind of hold that idea in preparation for next season.
And we may start putting pieces together on who needs to be involved with that and what we need now.
You've said that resilience is actually not something that happens during the disasters, that's built by disasters, but it's built long before them.
What do you mean by that? How can we create resiliency before we're actually suffering some of the hardships?
This preparedness thing we talk about, it kind of sounds like it's a noun, but it's kind of a verb.
That's Persia Payne Hurley, Assistant Director for Partnership Engagement at with North Carolina Emergency Management.
It's a long way of saying she's a disaster preparedness and resilience expert whose work explores how planning, trust, and local partnerships help communities grow stronger before they're ever put to the test.
Can you just explain what you think when people use the phrase preparedness?
This thing we call preparedness, it grows with the lessons that we learn after each disaster.
It grows with new technologies and the new needs that emerge from from this ever-changing world that we have.
And for my state in 2023, we weren't concerned with earthquake-level type impacts in North Carolina.
And those lessons, as an example, have stepped up our activities to prepare because now we understand the difference between what is a emergency, what's a disaster, and what's a catastrophic level of event in our state.
I think that a great way to describe me when I started this job was I was going 100 miles per hour because all I could think of is the storm's coming and it's coming and holy cow, there's a million things to do and trying to prioritize that because it can come up on you at any time.
If you had to think of a calendar, our hurricane season, for instance, which is the highest threat in North Carolina, it's from June the 1st until November the 30th, technically.
But what we do is we begin preparing for the next season, even when we're in season.
Right now, we're facing the height of our season, which is usually September, October, believe it or not.
Well, right this moment, we may be considering something that occurred to us that would be a great thing to do to be prepared, but we realize we're probably out of time to put it into action.
But we will do that planning and kind of hold that idea in preparation for next season.
And we may start putting pieces together on who needs to be involved with that and what we need now.
You've said that resilience is actually not something that happens during the disasters, that's built by disasters, but it's built long before them.
What do you mean by that? How can we create resiliency before we're actually suffering some of the hardships?
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