Get Back Up and Continue On

Guest: Ron Langhelm, Program Manager, Community and Infrastructure Resilience Program

Host: Dee Saini, Media Chief

[00:00:00] Ron Langhelm: Things go wrong and being able to do something instead of nothing, being able to save the life of a friend, a loved one, empowering kids to have an extra skill was profoundly good.

[00:00:05] Dave: This is Technologically Speaking, the official podcast for the Department of Homeland Security, Science & Technology Directorate, or S&T, as we call it. Join us as we meet the science and technology experts on the front lines, keeping America safe.

[00:00:09] Dee: Hi, welcome to Technologically Speaking, I'm your host, Dee Saini. We're going to talk to someone that's really awesome, a program manager at DHS S& T, Ron Langhelm. He's the program manager for the Directorate's Community and Infrastructure Resilience Program. Welcome Ron.

[00:00:40] Ron Langhelm: Good morning.

[00:00:41] Dee: I'm so glad we finally get a chance to have you for one of our podcast episodes. I want to start with a fun fact; we're practically neighbors.

[00:00:51] Ron Langhelm: No doubt. Just a little bit south of you.

[00:00:53] Dee: Yeah, so Ron and I both live in the Pacific Northwest.

[00:00:57] Ron Langhelm: I live south of Seattle and have been here for the majority of my life. It's my happy spot. I can still work in DC. I can travel, do all that, but it's my preference to reside here.

[00:01:07] Dee: So you grew up in the Pacific Northwest, right Ron?

[00:01:10] Ron Langhelm: I did.

[00:01:11] Dee: Nice. What did you want to be when you grew up? Did you want to do anything different than what you're doing now?

[00:01:17] Ron Langhelm: I'm here by accident. So, I did not plan to be here. I was looking for something to occupy my time and started as a volunteer with search and rescue. So, I evolved from being a search and rescue volunteer in the Pacific Northwest, with Bellingham Mountain Rescue, from there into some work with early cartography, computer mapping, and GIS. Then I evolved again from there into a starting a position with FEMA. And the rest is history.

[00:01:42] Dee: I get a sense you're someone that has a curious mindset, you like to pull things apart, see how they work, see how one talks to another, and I feel like that's probably helped you a lot in your career.

[00:01:54] Ron Langhelm: I'm very much a people person. I'm all about collaboration, getting folks to work together. It's been a big part of my success. In my job with FEMA I spent 11 years disaster response, out of region 10 and in all that work it was more about what we could do as a collective than anything I could do solely on my own. And then I have carried that to my other positions and here at S&T. So, that's part of my kind of general mindset. How I go about conducting business and incorporating everybody.

[00:02:22] Dee: You brought up that you worked for FEMA, which is operational, and now at S&T, it's R&D. What was it like to go from the operational side of things to the R&D side of things?

[00:02:34] Ron Langhelm: In the heat of battle with disaster support you get a lot done in a short amount of time, of course working 14, 16, 18-hour days. But on the opposite side of that, we're leading change, and providing a kind of perspective of the future with the work we do here at S&T. So, it's good to be on that side of things as well and see that change. Get deployed and influence the future.

[00:02:55] Dee: I feel like we have a really cool mission at S&T, right? A lot of the tools and technology and research and information that our operational components depend on start with a spark here, right? An idea here at S&T. I like that we get to be at the front end of the journey for a lot of the components we support throughout the department.

[00:03:18] Ron Langhelm: Yeah, no doubt. We have a very interesting perspective, collectively with the components, all of the work that’s going on.

[00:03:22] Dee: So you're a program manager with S&T's Community and Infrastructure Resilience Program. How do you describe what that is to folks around you? Perhaps your kids or, anyone else you usually come across that may not be familiar with what you do.

[00:03:37] Ron Langhelm: Essentially, it means having the ability to get back up and continue on. When we're looking at the work we're doing across our communities, empowering local governments, local communities, to be better prepared for disasters, for floods, for hurricanes, different types of events, helping them with the tools that they need to get back up and running after the event. The community and infrastructure resilience work is tied to a lot of FEMA missions.

We do work around that community level involvement. We've got some flood models, urban search and rescue things, that are really grassroots in the field. We also cover the infrastructure resilience side, helping to support communities. Helping to identify their requirements and their needs as it relates to disaster-based impacts. Fortifying structures from floodwaters. Being able to help folks better prepare for earthquakes and empower local communities to build up their resilience across the board.

[00:04:31] Dee: That sounds like a very large scope, Ron. Does that kind of embody the mission of the Community and Infrastructure Resilience Program?

[00:04:40] Ron Langhelm: Yeah. We have, over the years, done a little bit of everything - from first aid courses, got a hydrogen powered truck out a couple years ago. It's a very broad kind of expanse of work we do. All driven by requirements coming from the stakeholders, which primarily is FEMA, and then we do some work for CISA.

[00:04:57] Dee: Nice. I like that you brought up the H2 Rescue Truck and we'll dive into that here in a little bit. You brought up resilience, and resilience is obviously in the name of the program, but can you just lay out for us what is resilience and how do you define that in the context of your work?

[00:05:12] Ron Langhelm: Resilience, as it relates to our work in C&IR, really focuses on empowering communities with the ability to bounce back after a big event, and to better prepare prior to. So, as that would relate to the earthquake environment out here in the Northwest, we have a lot of efforts in place to fortify structures to prepare the community. Messaging around food and water and supplies that you need to have ideally on hand to support a disaster event. And then training efforts, with certain other programs that support that longer term resilience. The ability to bounce back, the ability to do something instead of nothing.

We have a lot of community members involved in my area that want to be able to stand up a small shelter in the area. They want to be able to provide basic first aid, all those kinds of things. As it relates more to the bigger infrastructure, we want to protect power generation stations from flooding.  Make sure they're elevated, make sure they have the fortification they need to keep the water out. Be able to do that modeling up front, to identify where the floodwaters will go, or may go, with a combination of, climate change, high tides, those types of things. Ensure that we're not losing power, that we're not losing, access to our sewer systems, our water systems, all of those, infrastructure pieces that we rely on every day.

[00:06:25] Dee: Yeah, that's really important. I want to ask you, at the time that we're recording this, the world's on fire again, right? In California, New Mexico, fire is already running rampant, high temperatures in Greece and Saudi Arabia, but I'm just curious to have your take as you see what's happening in the world around you.

[00:06:45] Ron Langhelm: In my private life that causes me to be generally chatty with people, friends, family, strangers, conversations about the weather, temperatures, those types of things. Because of the work I'm doing, I bring a different angle into it. The wildfire specific context right now in the Northwest, there's a messaging campaign going out. We're seeing it on Facebook. It's coming through basically every media source and that's helping to build a level of awareness. But at the same time, unless people actually take an action and do something with those links, or go to the website, what have you, they're still not sure what they can do as an individual.

I think that's part of the messaging that I work on again at my local level, in my private life, is just talking to the neighbors, also utilizing some of these opportunities to take advantage of conversations that are a result of bad things happening elsewhere and apply those to our community. How would that look? What would the impacts be? Where would we need to go to shelter? We've seen communities all the time where a shelter opens up for a fire and they have to move it to another location, simply based on the fact that the fire is moving, it's its own live creature. How does that work in this Northwest environment, where we have a lot of water features in the way of transportation. You can see where you need to be, but you have to drive around it. There's lots of those kinds of barriers to contend with. We see very firm messaging with tsunamis on the coast. There are street signs everywhere directing you to higher ground. You can be from somewhere completely different, visiting the coast, and if there's a tsunami you know where those signs are, and if you follow them, you get to higher ground and you'll be safer.

On the fire side it's a totally different scenario, because it's always unclear whether to go left or right or north or south. That's where the messaging we're seeing now is really doing quite a bit to help get the community's mindset a little bit more in the game, because we have trees everywhere, we have a huge fire potential roaming around us all the time.

[00:08:30] Dee: Can you walk me through this quote? “Plans get written down and the thinking stops.” What does that mean?

[00:08:36] Ron Langhelm: That's the idea that a lot of the planning efforts that are underway, and have been made in the past, often times where once a plan is done, a formal plan for an evacuation or whatever, the dynamic thinking stalls out. People stop worrying about the details because the details have already been captured, and captured by somebody else, and it's easy to update that plan and move forward. I find it very interesting, as just a human from the social science perspective, how do we reengage in those conversations? How do we look at those again and make sure that they're still relevant and that they're still achievable?

[00:09:12] Dee: Yeah

[00:09:13] Ron Langhelm: You know, there's an awful lot things that change in the world between completing a document and put it into action. I just see a very big decline in that dynamic thinking to try to get to having the best materials out there for doing the work that we need to do, and protecting our communities, protecting lives, protecting property.

[00:09:31] Dee: Let's talk about some key projects you're currently managing. If you want to dive into a few.

[00:09:36] Ron Langhelm: So the top of my list is the urban search and rescue common operating platform effort that we've got underway. We've been working on it for a couple of years now, and essentially, we are building and advancing a mapped-based viewer that is tracking urban search and rescue teams on the ground the divisions that they're working under, empowering field observers to go out and collect observed data, identify damages, basically anything they're seeing out there. It's been a big step forward.

GIS and maps have been a part of urban search and rescue for the past 20 years. GIS is a geographic information system, and it is a system comprised of software, people, data, everything map based. You can get a degree in GIS. GIS is rooted in land use, in transportation planning, in just about every aspect of our lives at this point. It started out as being a very niche career path, a finite use, and now we have Google maps. We have all these solutions that have taken GIS and made it available to everybody all the time.

So SARCOP is a tool set. It's all GIS based. It is a series of maps, it is data, it is dashboards, it's visualization, it's analytics. Anything you can imagine a map doing, SARCOP is doing, but it is doing that specifically for the search and rescue mission. The teams on the ground are leaving a breadcrumb trail as they move about the field. The dog teams, search teams, field observers, all of these different subsets of the USAR program are out in the field and they're all coming up on the map, we know where they are. They can identify details about structure damage, everything that they're seeing. They can take a picture, they can add notes.

All of that information rolls up and comes back into the system and is available for managers at the top level, at the field level, everybody has visibility. It is providing that content through these dashboards, so we can see where folks are. We can see the number of houses impacted, how many teams are in the field, where those teams are from. The amount of time that SARCOP is saving is immense. It's incredible. The amount of time the SARCOP is saving for communications alone, is worthwhile. The amount of time that folks spend on a radio, relaying where they are, their location information, the details about what they're observing, what their team's up to. All of that is being done by radio contact, like it's been done in the past. If it's being done by cell phones, it's taking a different amount of effort than people just plotting along on a map and moving out and about doing their job. It's a very passive information collection system for the folks in the field.

For the folks on the management side, they have a visibility into the whole world of search and rescue and everybody is using the same platform. It doesn't matter where the SAR team is from in the USAR program. They're all using SARCOP. They can work side by side. They can work on opposite sides of the river. At this point, SARCOP is being utilized by all 28 federal urban search and rescue teams. There's at least a hundred teams using it across the country. We've got deployment metrics since 2021 when SARCOP was first initiated, so in 2021 there were eight deployments. 2022, 22 deployments, in 2023, 57, and as of May 9th in 2024, 43 deployments. So, every time USAR is out, SARCOP is with them. Every time some of the states are out, they have SARCOP with them. They're supporting floods, hurricanes, fires, tornadoes, you name it. Anytime there is a reason to have search and rescue on the ground following a disaster type event, SARCOP has been there.

[00:13:12] Dee: It sounds like this is a tool that standardizes mapping that helps them in the field, correct?

[00:13:18] Ron Langhelm: It's standardizing mapping. It's standardized all of the information collection. We have full continuity and full visibility with the teams. It has put us light years ahead of where we were just a few years ago.

[00:13:29] Dee: I want to dive into the community lifeline status system. Seems like it's a no-cost technical solution that's designed to help emergency management agencies operationalize FEMA's community lifelines. Can you just dive into what these lifelines are and how this works?

[00:13:49] Ron Langhelm: Yeah, so FEMA created the Community Lifeline Construct, and with that there are a series of lifelines identified that are essentially supporting FEMA in conducting triage, as far as resource allocations. So, with all of the states reporting with a kind of continuity and a consistency. It's a simple color system, red, yellow, green, and they know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the state's status has been reported by the state emergency manager. As an example, transportation - all of the states involved in a large-scale disaster around a hurricane. Hurricanes hit four or five states, what have you. Each of the states is reporting through the construct and they've all reported on the status of their transportation. And then FEMA, at the national level, looking at resources and what kind of requirements they have for this overall event. It assists FEMA headquarters in applying resources and moving things out into the field. From a state perspective what we are doing with CLSS is providing a tool set that allows a state emergency manager, or county emergency manager, to work through their lifeline status with a data driven approach. They can upload geospatial data, they can get road damage, bridge damage, those kinds of things within this transportation kind of topic area.

And then when the state emergency manager goes to provide a report to FEMA headquarters on lifeline status, they have the data backing their decision making. They can provide as much or as little information as is needed to get that up and offer their report. So what we what we saw from the state perspective was states were looking for some ability so that they would have continuity and be able to work through a repeatable process. What FEMA gets is the reports from the states. What we are doing at S&T is working with stakeholders at the state, local, county level to walk through the process, the data that they want to utilize for the reports and get them to the point of having that data driven approach to a lifeline status.

[00:15:50] Dee: I feel like that makes such a huge difference, especially when it comes to any disasters that are affecting regions, whether it's at a state, multi-regional, or local level.

[00:16:01] Ron Langhelm: Yeah, no doubt, and bringing that continuity is I think one of the most important aspects of it from my perspective. And on the backside of that, having the geospatial data feeding into it is creating and providing the states with the ability to share data with their counterparts, cross state lines with their local jurisdictions, and the local jurisdictions sharing up to their states. So it's really opened up a data sharing opportunity that we haven't seen before.

[00:16:28] Dee: I want to dive into the H2 rescue truck. I'm really excited to talk about this one because you and I, and our teams, worked really hard to amplify this recently in partnership with the Department of Energy and Army ERDC. Can you talk about what this truck is, what the promise of it is?

[00:00:00] Ron Langhelm: I guess going back to the early phases of it, the conversation came about around new fuel and alternate fuel sources providing electricity and supporting disaster operations. So typically, if a community is down with a hurricane, power's out. EOC's got a backup generator. If that emergency operations center's generator doesn't work, another one can be brought in, but a lot of diesel is involved in this whole process. What we set out to build was a hydrogen powered vehicle, that can provide onsite power. That was been led by Army Corps of Engineers and it's been a great partnership with Army Corps, Department of Energy and S&T, and we've been supporting this on behalf of FEMA's missions for disaster response.

So the end product is a full size commercial truck. It has had the diesel powertrain removed from it. It's been replaced with an electric powertrain, and then we have a hydrogen fuel cell that creates electricity, charges the battery packs, and makes the whole thing go. The vehicle specs, we wanted to have the ability to travel 200 miles from point A to point B and get to its location. and at that point, we wanted it to be able to provide emergency power for 72 hours, nonstop or continuous. It has to carry a large volume of hydrogen, but once on site it is essentially quiet. It's not making any noise. The only exhaust coming off of it is water vapor, and that water vapor can also be captured. We can actually collect the water off of it. It's non-potable at this point, but we're looking at opportunities to filter that and make it usable for showers, other functions. And then from an electricity output perspective, it can power about 20 homes for that 72 hours. It is awe inspiring  what it's capable of.

In the field tests we did with it we brought it to Colorado. It was brought there for testing first, and then we also did a demonstration for the FEMA regional office at the same time as part of the driving test. One of the unique things about that elevation, Denver is a mile high city, barometric pressure is different. Anything that breathes is going to operate a little different, and the fuel cell is typically lives in a fixed location and is not mobile. So, bringing that from California up to Colorado resulted in some difficulties in this fuel cell's ability to start. Initially, there was some Concerns with that. The truck was brought down in elevation by a couple hundred feet and the fuel cell was able to start and everything was fine. It was an interesting nuance of field testing and doing a real-world evaluation and demonstration of a prototype vehicle. We headed to D. C. for a couple different presentations, but one of them was at FEMA headquarters.

[00:19:26] Dee: What is the response been like on this?

[00:19:28] Ron Langhelm: The response has all been very positive. It's the first time a lot of the folks on the project that work in hydrogen power and fuel cells as their career, it's first time they've had one that was mobile, generally a fuel cell is a fixed unit. So having this on a vehicle with changing altitudes, changing parameters, based on where it's moving around to, has been a very different scenario. From the stakeholder side of it's been really great seeing regional directors, the FEMA administrator at headquarters, saw the truck, got the tour of the vehicle, was in the truck. She wanted to know when and how she can use this, the potential for it, being deployed to a shelter. Again, it's completely quiet. It's not making any noise. There's no generator hum, there's no exhaust. All of that is hugely beneficial.

[00:20:10] Dee: Yeah

[00:20:11] Ron Langhelm: I will say it's ahead of its time. It's an early push for this technology, because probably the majority of response operations revolve around diesel. A lot of trucks, a lot of generators, and that's how it's been working. So that's one of the barriers that we need to surpass is, how do we get beyond that? How do we ensure that we have hydrogen delivery and can have the fuel everywhere it's needed all of the time. I don't see this as being the solution, but it's certainly a solution for our opportunities in the future with different fuel sources and different technologies.

[00:20:58] Dee: That's what I like about modern day solutions. I mean in the past you would build one tool to solve one specific problem set, but I feel like you know with the h2 rescue truck it's multifaceted, right? It has so many different things going on with it, in terms of producing hydrogen, or providing power, it's environmentally friendly, right? I just feel like it's amazing that you get to work in this space where you get to approach technology, not just from a one prong approach, but from a multi prong approach. I think that's fascinating,

[00:21:14] Ron Langhelm: Yeah, having a big picture perspective, and that brainstorming early on of all of the potential opportunities for it, really helped to kind of define an assortment of use cases and a lot of different places we could apply it.

[00:21:26] Dee: Ron, is there one key project you worked on that you felt had a significant impact on Homeland Security? Not even recent, but you could span your career.

[00:21:37] Ron Langhelm: Yes, there's a lot of work that I've done over the years; my FEMA roles, I supported 9/11, I supported the space shuttle recovery, Katrina, as well as a bunch of other disasters. I've had a lot of experience in the field, doing profoundly good things, things that we could accomplish at a kind of moment's notice, because of the event. On the S&T side, we had a lot of different projects over the years. One of the ones that's closed out, but was fairly recent, was the First Aid for Severe Trauma training. With that, we took the Stop the Bleed curriculum and adapted it, made it age appropriate for high school students. Made it all hazards. So really focused all the hazards that folks look at in life. If you're 19, 17, 16, there's this whole invincible phase. Things go wrong and being able to do something instead of nothing, being able to save the life of a friend, a loved one, empowering kids to, have an extra skill, was, profoundly good.

And we took that curriculum, we worked with our contractor on it, developed the curriculum, and then provided that to American Red Cross. American Red Cross is now delivering that curriculum at no cost to people 18 and under so that was a profound change. It was an interesting change for Red Cross, because it's a different model than they've used in the past, and one of the things I find very interesting about the deployment of the First Aid for Severe Trauma training through Red Cross is they've had a lot of folks requesting it that are adults that are above 18. They liked the fact that we added a general, first aid approach to the start of the curriculum, as well as the all hazards approach

[00:23:11] Dee: I want to go back to something you brought up earlier. I know you said you worked on efforts with 9/11, with Hurricane Katrina, we've already passed the 20-year mark since 9/11. Next year we'll approach the 20 year mark since Katrina. When you were there then, and now looking at where we're at now, and how much time has gone by, and how much you've grown and evolved in your career, how do you today just reflect back on those two major incidents in our country's history now?

[00:23:46] Ron Langhelm: I was very much involved in the response to both of them. What I found throughout my career was that, and continues to be that, every life lesson I carry that forward. All of the different things I experienced in the field as a FEMA employee, each next disaster, I was able to apply this new knowledge. One of the profound things I remember from the past was understanding the grieving victims, and times where I was in a position working with somebody that lived in that area where I'd been deployed to, and seeing their decision making, being in that position of being a grieving victim. I learned how I could help, and how I could work with them to get to better solutions.

I also learned to understand the impact that this was having on the individual, somebody losing their house, all of these different scenarios. And it really changed my perspective going forward and made me a better leader going forward because I had this little tidbit of knowledge that was from the School of Hard Knocks, that had I not seen it firsthand, I wouldn't have understood its magnitude. Being able to harness the power of all of the people. On the space shuttle recovery operation, we had a big meeting to decide which version of software to use. Something was very simple that I could have just made an executive decision on, but querying the crowd of folks supporting me, and finding their strong points, allowed us to make a decision that the group was proficient with, and that we can move forward with rapidly. So a lot of unique brainstorming opportunities, unique conversations, unique opportunities, just to sit down and talk, and figure things out. So yeah, a lot of goodness there.

[00:25:14] Dee: What do you think the world would be like without a program like this or the work that you contribute to?

[00:25:19] Ron Langhelm: The work that I contribute to with my program, I feel like we're very much involved in helping FEMA meet it's requirements and its needs. Bolstering that safety, bolstering the idea of resilience, across the country, all of that is bringing us to, hopefully, be better prepared for the future and better able to adapt to the changes that we're going to see.

[00:25:40] Dee: Change is constant, right? That's the only thing we know is that change is inevitable. What are some of the challenges that you and your team might endure as you're approaching your work with the Community and Infrastructure Resilience Program?

[00:25:53] Ron Langhelm: Some of the challenges are just simple as finding the right people at the right time. We do a lot of collaborative work. We rely a lot on our performers to help identify the proper stakeholders. I very much enjoy having a stakeholder driven solution environment and the more we can talk to folks and understand the core needs of their day-to-day requirements, their work requirements. A little bit of conversation you can get past the planned conversation and get further into the weeds of the other needs. The little nuanced things that are going to make a big difference.

[00:26:28] Dee: Is there anything interesting or unusual about working within your program that you wanted to point out?

[00:26:34] Ron Langhelm: I find all of the work interesting. I can be talking to somebody in one domain on wildfire one week, and then talking about flooding the next week - bouncing around. In those kinds of discussions the day evolves the same way. So there's a lot of different things happening, a lot of different topic areas.

[00:26:49] Dee: There's so many threats that are constantly evolving, things 20 years ago we never even thought were imaginable, and you know a lot of that affects the work that you do today. Where do you hope to see the program go in the future, or what might be on the horizon? What are you and your team looking toward?

[00:27:08] Ron Langhelm: The general goals for the future with the program revolve around ensuring that we're doing everything we can to support FEMA's missions wherever possible. We can do an awful lot of good for disaster management, emergency management, at the EOC level, as well as the grassroots level for our programs, for our communities.

[00:27:26] Dee: What do you see as the biggest technological challenges and opportunities for S&T, especially in the next five years or so?

[00:27:32] Ron Langhelm: We're looking towards the future of the emergency management environment. The AI twists and turns we're going to have to deal with. What does data management look like in the future? What can and can't we do within the bounds of our legal environment within the United States? The technology exists to track everybody's phone all the time, and that's illegal. How can we harness some of that information, from a broad perspective, without knowing who the people are, to understand traffic patterns? How can we use that same type of structure to identify evacuation opportunities? How to understand where the community is at any given time, or at the point of a specific event to understand do they need to go north, south, east or west? What's best for them?

So those types of twists are going to be very, interesting going forward.

What can we do with advanced modeling? Flood models have been around for years, earthquake models have been around for years, but new twists in technology, new advancements are going to enable us to do things faster, and to get better results. All of that's going to revolve around ensuring we've got the right information feeding into them, the right events, the right background data. All of those sorts of things that get us to that better answer.

Looking at resilience, I think we have a lot of opportunity to look at hazard mitigation plans and better understand their effectiveness. Look at the plans, look at the communities, what are the things that are the hooks that actually made them work? I guess the last thing would be all of the various needs of our communities - language barriers, hearing, visibility. I'm colorblind. There's things that in my work I have to make sure that I can see the colors so that the other people can. How do we make sure we're getting alert messages out properly to all of the folks, everybody in the United States? How do we do that effectively, quickly, so that it has the best message for them and gives them the information that they need to take action.

[00:29:18] Dee: You mentioned that you're colorblind. Earlier we talked about, the community lifeline status systems that are color coded or things like that. when you do some of this work and it involves colors, do have to have another team member double check what color you think you're looking a,t versus what is being looked at.

[00:29:38] Ron Langhelm: Just trying to make sure that it's understood. That this is a thing, and it's not just me. And there's times where, maybe the color needs to be listed. Does this thing to say red, green, yeah, it's perplexing.

[00:29:48] Dee: All the work we do has to serve all types of peoples, regardless of what anyone's dealing with. You have more people at the table with different types of issues.

[00:30:00] Ron Langhelm: Yep. I cringe at the box of broken crayons without labels.

[00:30:04] Dee: If you had to choose an entirely different career, what would that be?

[00:30:08] Ron Langhelm: I think it would be a coffee shop-bicycle repair-brewery.

[00:30:13] Dee: That's great. We talked about a multi-pronged approach before, but I can see how that would really work.

[00:30:18] Ron Langhelm: Yeah, it'd be like a space needle, rotating-building approach. I've thought through this one, actually.

[00:30:23] Dee: Ron, work aside, we all need downtime. Something to take our mind off because, like you said earlier, some of your work has to do with human remains, right? Or other tough subject matters that sometimes you just need to put in a box and decompress for a while. So outside of work do you have any favorite hobbies? Or how would you spend the perfect day off?

[00:30:45] Ron Langhelm: my hobbies are being impaired by my aging body. So that's the first constraint.

[00:30:50] Dee: I know what that's like.

[00:30:51] Ron Langhelm: Getting outside is my primary goal. It's hiking, going for a bike ride, getting out on the water, what have you. That's where I can go to clear my head.

[00:30:59] Dee: It is so beautiful here, I've never lived in a more beautiful place. It draws people to want to be outside.

[00:31:06] Ron Langhelm: It's my go to.

[00:30:04] Dee: What's the wildest thing you've witnessed on a ferry ride?

[00:31:10] Ron Langhelm: There was a large fire started in Bellingham, after a gas main was ruptured that flooded Whatcom Falls, Whatcom Creek. And then kids were playing with fireworks in the water at the same time.

[00:31:22] Dee: Oh no.

[00:31:24] Ron Langhelm: I was on the ferry and saw a mushroom cloud in Bellingham.

[00:31:26] Dee: Okay, so did your work brain just activate? Did you actually want to just step in and start doing stuff?

[00:31:32] Ron Langhelm: Oh yeah, my first thought was, “how am I going to get off this boat?” I'm not sure I had the credentials to get them to turn it around, but it proved to be not my problem that day.

[00:31:40] Dee: Ron, is there anything I did not ask, about your work or anything that you would like to make sure you get out there?

[00:31:48] Ron Langhelm: I do believe that we at S&T are doing some incredibly, well I do believe, incredible things. There's a lot going on within the department, not just my program area. I know the work that I'm in charge of, that I'm leading, I see the value, I understand its impacts.

I don't always understand the impacts of other people's work within the department, but the enthusiasm our teams, our folks, have is infectious and across the board, from the top feds, to everybody in between, our contract support, everybody is just working diligently to do good things every day.

[00:32:23] Dee: Ron Langhelm, Program Manager with the Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate, Community and Infrastructure Resilience Program, so happy you're here. So glad we got to talk. Thank you for sharing about your work, your life, and just letting us get to know you as a person. Thank you, Ron.

[00:32:40] Ron Langhelm: Thanks. Appreciate the time.

[00:32:42] Dave: Thank you for listening to Technologically Speaking. To learn more about what you've heard in this episode check out the show notes on our website, and follow us on Apple Podcasts and YouTube, and on social media at DHS SciTech. D H S S C I T E C H. Bye!