Emergency Readiness at the Scale of the World’s Busiest Airport

Extraordinary events require organizations to maintain critical operations and communications while coordinating across numerous internal and external partners. At Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, those capabilities are tested through Big Bird, ATL’s regulatory full-scale aircraft accident exercise. Nearly two and a half years in the making, the exercise simulates a mass-casualty incident involving more than 150 victims and brings together airport personnel, airlines, contractors, first responders, hospitals, law enforcement and federal partners.

Leola Chaney will share lessons from this complex undertaking and explore how its approaches to exercise planning, multiagency coordination, continuity, communication, evaluation and continuous improvement can inform utility outage response and emergency readiness.

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Presenter:

Leola “Lola” Chaney, Assistant Director of Emergency Management, Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport

Leola “Lola” Chaney serves as Assistant Director of Emergency Management at Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where she leads the Emergency Preparedness Team for the City of Atlanta Department of Aviation. A retired Air Force combat veteran with 17 years of service as a Command Post Controller, she brings over two decades of emergency management experience spanning aviation, government, and community response. Lola holds ALEM and CBCP certifications and is completing a Doctor of Public Administration at Liberty University, where her research examines organizational resilience in emergency preparedness. She also founded Preparation, Disaster and Recovery, a professional consultancy supporting disaster readiness and continuity planning.

 

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