When terrorist attacks struck the United States on September 11, 2001, local first responders were called upon to serve on the national stage. Among them was former Lincoln Fire and Rescue Fire Chief John Huff, who had previously spearheaded the effort to get Lincoln involved in FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue system.
The initiative began years earlier in 1991 following a letter from the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency seeking volunteers for a national disaster program. “I put out an email to our fire department, and I had 90 people respond,” Huff recalls. “A third of them said, ‘Sounds like something that might be interesting.’ So we sent a letter, tell us more.”
After navigating a lengthy application process, Lincoln became the only department in the region to secure a spot in the national system at the time. “I was the only one dumb enough to do the application,” Huff joked. “Nobody west of us, nobody east of us, so we were it…