Richmond emergency managers outline Hagerty-driven reforms, pledge upgrades to planning, staffing and communications

Richmond emergency management officials told the Public Safety Standing Committee that they have accepted all recommendations from an outside incident assessment and are moving to update emergency plans, expand continuity-of-operations work and broaden public alerting ahead of the height of hurricane season.

At the meeting, Stephen Willoughby, director of emergency communications, preparedness and response for the city of Richmond, and Paul Hundley, an emergency planner with the Department of Social Services assigned to the Office of Emergency Management, described steps the city will take to implement Hagerty’s findings and to improve tools such as Richmond Ready and WebEOC. Council members pressed staff about communication failures and the city’s staffing and operational readiness following the January water incident.

The committee heard an overview of preparedness work tied to the 2025 hurricane forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a review of specific implementation steps recommended by Hagerty. Willoughby said the city "has accepted all of Hagerty's recommendations, and we plan on implementing them all," and outlined a multi‑year program of updates that includes an integrated preparedness plan, a revised emergency operations plan (EOP), a resource‑management plan, a point‑of‑distribution (POD) plan, a…