Mutual aid network joins county and municipalities to assess damage

Key Takeaways

When more than a foot of rain fell on parts of southeastern Wisconsin over a single August weekend last year, Waukesha County’s emergency management office had exactly three people on staff to make sense of the damage.       

Thousands of homes had taken on water. The clock on federal reimbursement deadlines was already running. And every neighboring community was scrambling for the same limited pool of help.

What the county had this time that it hadn’t had in past disasters was a team.

It was the first time that Waukesha County’s Countywide Damage Assessment Team — a shared roster of county and municipal staff who can be dispatched to canvass storm damage across jurisdictional lines — got a chance to put its new program into action.

A problem most counties know well

The gap the team was built to close is one that will sound familiar to emergency managers nationwide: too few people, too much ground to cover, too little time.

“If you have a major flood, or an EF4 or 5 tornado with hundreds of homes damaged, it’s just not something that two or three people can accomplish,” said Alex Freeman, emergency management coordinator for Waukesha County. Outside of major metro areas, he noted, most counties run their emergency management operations with an emergency manager and one or two support staff — a level of staffing quickly overwhelmed when damage assessments must be completed under tight state and federal reimbursement timelines.

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Waukesha County, Wis.'s Countywide Damage Assessment Team earned a 2026 NACo Achievement Award and a Best in Category honor in Risk and Emergency Management.

The county had already lived that math. The trigger event, Freeman said, dated back to the EF-2 tornado that struck the Village of Eagle in 2010, damaging more than 75 homes and leaving damage assessment to a county emergency management office that, at the time, had a staff of two.

Formal conversations about a shared team surfaced as early as 2016, in correspondence with one of the county’s municipal fire chiefs. 

The idea gained momentum with renewed outreach in 2021 and 2022, and the county convened its first work group meeting in December 2023.

Borrowing a blueprint from Florida

Grant Deal, Waukesha County’s deputy emergency management coordinator, who built and now coordinates the program, started by looking for a model he could adapt rather than invent one from scratch.

“I started kind of looking around, reaching out to other counties, using our regional director at the state level to reach out to the other regions, to try and get as much statewide reach as possible to see if anyone’s already established a team like this,” he said.

When that search came up empty, he turned to Google — and found a plan from Seminole County, Fla., a jurisdiction with plenty of hard-won hurricane experience. A phone call led to a copy of Seminole County’s countywide memorandum of understanding with its municipalities, which Grant used as a baseline and reshaped with the work group into something built for Waukesha County.

The result is a mutual-aid framework made available to the county’s 37 cities, towns and villages. Municipalities that sign the MOU agree to provide a minimum of two personnel to the team — often people with local knowledge the county doesn’t have on its own bench.

“Each of them, they have local knowledge and local responders and folks that are trained, such as building inspectors that the county wouldn’t have,” Freeman said. “No municipality is going to have enough staff to deal with this, just like the county might not have enough staff to deal with it, but together we can have this mutual-aid network and help each other out.”

Just as important as the roster was the data. Rather than default to the state’s damage assessment survey — the route many Wisconsin counties take, which leaves the state as the owner of the data — Waukesha County built its own survey, combining elements of the state’s tool with FEMA’s documentation and adding fields the county wanted to capture. That decision to own its own data would pay off later.

Buy-in came easily. “We did not receive much pushback at all,” Deal said, crediting longstanding working relationships with local police and fire chiefs and elected officials. The need, Freeman added, tends to sell itself once residents see a disaster up close: “We had people who were asking to join during the floods last year.”

The first real test

The team’s first deployment was also one of the worst flooding events the region has seen in a generation.

Beginning the evening of Saturday, Aug. 9, 2025, training thunderstorms stalled over southeastern Wisconsin and dumped rain for hours. Widespread totals across Waukesha County ran from 5 to 10 inches, with localized amounts in the eastern part of the county topping a foot. The storm set a new statewide 24-hour rainfall record of 14.55 inches — measured just over the county line in northwest Milwaukee — and was later classified as a 1,000-year flood. The eastern half of Waukesha County bore the brunt, with a mix of flash and basement flooding, riverine flooding and lakeshore flooding.

Deal was out of town when the rain started, so Freeman ran the county’s initial response. The Emergency Operations Center activated, and thousands of damage reports began pouring in through Wisconsin’s IMPACT 211 line and the county’s dispatch center. County IT and GIS staff combined that raw data and produced heat maps showing the hardest-hit neighborhoods, which the county shared through internal dashboards and public-facing maps. Data analysts then filtered the reports down to the most severely damaged homes — the FEMA “major” and “destroyed” categories that drive reimbursement eligibility — so assessment crews could be sent where they mattered most.

Crucially, the team is not something the county deploys on its own authority. It’s a requestable resource that municipalities tap only after signing onto the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).

“We don’t own it, we’re just a part of it. We’re just taking the lead,” Deal said. When a community realized it was overwhelmed, it reached out to the EOC and requested the team. Waukesha County’s Office of Emergency Management  polled members, coordinated deployment and sent crews out in groups of three or four to report to a municipal coordinator staged at a city or village hall. Local officials identified the areas to canvass; the county tracked accountability. Teams were also advised to coordinate with local law enforcement for safety — a lesson drawn in part from the risks responders faced in the aftermath of flooding in North Carolina.

Measuring what worked

By drawing on this resource, Waukesha County didn’t have to compete for the regional mutual-aid resources that were flowing toward neighboring Milwaukee County, which was hit even harder.

“When we were able to be self-sufficient,” Deal said, his office could stay in the EOC and focus on quality control and quality assurance of the submissions, rather than pulling staff out to collect data and thinning coverage on both ends.

The recovery numbers followed. The August flooding drew a presidential major disaster declaration in September 2025 that made Waukesha County residents eligible for FEMA Individual Assistance. Freeman said the disaster ultimately brought roughly $19.5 million in FEMA assistance to impacted residents, along with about $4.5 million in low-interest U.S. Small Business Administration disaster loans. There’s no way to know exactly where the eligibility cutoff fell, he acknowledged — “it is a sliding scale” — but getting more complete, higher-quality assessments in quickly could only help the county’s case.

Today, the team numbers 93 members drawn from 26 municipalities. Owning its own survey has let the county pre-populate the forms FEMA requires and hand municipal partners near-complete documentation to finish, rather than sending blank links to contacts who may not have the details on hand. Deal now works closely with the state’s GIS coordinator and sits on Wisconsin’s work group for updating its damage assessment survey and processes.

“We kind of trade our little secrets and go back and forth,” he said.