UNH Offers New Graduate Program in Disaster Response

In the past two years, Connecticut has been hit by a tornado, an earthquake, a hurricane, a blizzard, and a freak snowstorm, and experts say the state can expect more of the same.

So it was not entirely a coincidence that the University of New Haven has begun offering a new master’s degree program in emergency management.

The new post-graduate program is an extension of a certificate program that UNH started last year, according to Wayne Sandford, formerly the fire chief and emergency management director in East Haven for 14 years, who heads up the university’s new offering. 

The master’s degree program, the first of its kind in Connecticut, was approved in the fall by the state Board of Higher Education. This comes as no surprise given that the U.S. Department of Labor expects emergency management to be one of the fastest growing job fields in coming years.

“Emergency management is an area that’s wide open,” Sandford says.

In 2005 after he retired, Gov. Jodi Rell asked Sandford to serve as deputy director of the Connecticut Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security.

Sandford had taught fire sciences courses at the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences at UNH. When Rell decided not to seek re-election, Sandford left his state job, and Richard Ward, Dean of the College, asked him to head up the formation of the new Master’s of Science program. 

How the UNH Program Works

To get into the master’s program, a student needs a bachelor’s degree, but Sandford said the requirements are flexible. About 17 individuals are currently in the certificate program and six have entered the master’s program. Some are from private companies and some have public sector jobs, he said. 

Students in the program would study what hazards are experienced during a disaster, how to plan for them and how to manage recovery operations.

“One of the areas we know least about across the country is recovery,” he says. Disasters can cause all sorts of unexpected social problems that are poorly understood. 

As an example, Sandford pointed out that about 600,000 people were relocated during evacuations for Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Only about 200,000 of them have returned to their former homes. The rest had to start over again in new homes scattered all across the United States.

“How do you deal with that? How do we help people who are going through a disaster like that?” he said. 

Different Types of Disasters

The emergencies classified as natural disasters include hurricanes. “Obviously,” said Sandford, who lives in East Haven, one of the hardest hit communities in Connecticut from Tropical Storm Irene last August.

But also includes winter storms like the freak October nor’easter that caused historic number of power outages, tornadoes like the one that hit Bridgeport in 2010, floods, which Sandford said is the number one threat in the United States, and deadly heat waves.

As for manmade disasters, “The word you and I would most commonly use is terrorism,” Sandford said. 

Technological disasters could include anything from a chemical spill to a cyberattack on vital computer systems or falling space junk. Pandemics, either from naturally emerging viruses or bioterrorism, cross several disaster classifications, he said. 

Nuclear Threats 

The Fukushima nuclear disaster that accompanied the earthquake and tsunami natural disaster in Japan last March revealed another weakness in U.S. emergency preparedness.

 “There’s a big study going on now that will impact every nuclear reactor across the United States,” Sandford said.

Up to now, disaster planners only had to prepare evacuation plans for areas 10 miles around reactors, but orders might soon be issued to expand those