Lee County Public Safety adds two Emergency Management staffers
Lee County Public Safety has two new Emergency Management staffers, boosting the department’s national and statewide expertise as the 2014 hurricane season approaches.
Jim Bjostad is the department’s new Emergency Management Program Manager; and, Lee Mayfield has been hired as the Emergency Planning Manager.
Bjostad comes to Lee County from Washington, D.C., where he has spent five years representing the Department of Defense on the Federal Geographic Data Committee. He has worked closely with the Department of Homeland Security, including FEMA, and the Department of the Interior to improve and enhance DoD’s geospatial information mapping support for state and local first-responders throughout the nation following natural disasters.
He served as a U.S. Coast Guard officer for 29 years, retiring at the rank of captain in 2009. As Coast Guard Sector Commander in Mobile, Ala., from 2004 to 2007, he was the Coast Guard Incident Commander for the response following five hurricanes during 2004-2005, including Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina.
Mayfield is a former Collier County Emergency Management Coordinator and EOC Operations Chief. He was responsible for the emergency sheltering program, training coordination and support to other areas including logistics and planning.
He also worked for the Florida Division of Emer-gency Management and was a state regional liaison to 10 County Emergency Man-agement programs in South-west Florida.
While working for the state, he served in the Oper-ation and Planning Sections in the State Emergency Operations Center during disasters and was involved in state-wide catastrophic disaster planning efforts.
Recent disasters worked include the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Haiti Repatriation post-earthquake.
For additional information, visit www.safe-lee.org