About The Council

The Rhode Island Emergency Management Advisory Council was establsihed under Rhode Island General Law 30-15-6.

RIEMAC is chaired by Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Roberts. The council consists of 32 members and 17 ex officio members - with an additional 15 members appointed by the Governor.

In order to ensure a mechanism is in place to coordinate the state's overall homeland security efforts, the council formed the Domestic Preparedness Subcommittee in June, 2001.

The mission of the Domestic Preparedness Subcommittee is to protect the safety of Rhode Island's citizens by improving the state's ability to prevent and respond to terrorist incidents involving Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in partnership with federal, state, and local agencies and organizations.

The Domestic Preparedness Subcommittee's functions include the following:

• Coordinate the use of terrorism preparedness grant funding, which is received from various state agencies for equipment, training, exercises, technical assistance, and planning.
• Use the limited funds for WMD response equipment to fill priority gaps in the inventories of state and local response agencies.
• Coordinate terrorism response training and exercises to ensure optimum cross-program usage of limited funds and resources.
• Develop exercise schedules to ensure all emergency response agencies and organizations in all regionsof the state are practiced in terrorism response on a continuing basis.
• Serve as the advisory committee to the Rhode Island Department of Health for the Public Health Preparedness and Response to Bioterrorism cooperative agreement.

More about EMAC