Emergency services coordinator thrives on job

After 18 years coordinating emergency services, Cindy Mullaney can’t imagine doing anything else, even though her resume is full of different lines of work.

The now-60-year-old Mullaney held such jobs as secretary to the dean of a famous school of law and purchasing agent for a steamboat company before eventually landing in her current position as deputy director of the Flathead County Office of Emergency Services.

Mullaney was born and raised in Conrad, Mont., where she lived until she graduated from Conrad High School in 1970. Right out of high school, she was hired as the secretary to the dean of Yale Law School in New Haven, Conn.

After about three years, Mullaney left the job and jumped coasts, moving to San Francisco.

“I worked for the dean at the Hastings School of Law, which is part of the University of California system for a couple of years,” Mullaney said. “Then I worked for a couple of law firms and ended up becoming the recruitment administrator for the law firm.”

Mullaney then made a move south to Los Angeles, where she landed a job working for a steamboat company.

“The law firm I was working for was leaving San Francisco and moving over to the Oakland area and I didn’t want to work in Oakland,” she said. “There was an opening in this firm that I knew about and I was their purchasing agent for about two or three years.”

After her jaunt in the world of maritime business, Mullaney returned to a law firm that dealt with international finance and the consolidation of major corporations. The office maintained branches in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as international offices in Hong Kong and Tehran, Iran.

Mullaney finally left Los Angeles in 1989, moving to South Carolina for a brief period before returning to Montana in 1990, when she took a job at the hospital in Conrad.

AFTER SEVERAL YEARS working for Pondera County, Mullaney was hired as the county’s disaster and emergency services coordinator in 1995. She spent 12 years in Pondera County before moving to Flathead County in July 2007.

“One of the things I like about the job that I do now is that in some small way I feel like I make a difference in the lives of the people first in Pondera County and now in Flathead County,” Mullaney said. “It’s a really interesting job, you get to work with people from all walks of life, from local government officials, state, federal, non-profits, private industry, the general public. No day is ever the same and it’s really interesting.”

Still, Mullaney never expected to be where she is today.

“If anyone had told me, years ago, that I would be effective as a planner, I probably would have said ‘Who, me?’ But I’m pretty good at it, so I’m told,” she said.

Part of her local success may be due to her being thrown in the fire, so to speak, within her first few days of beginning work in Flathead County. She started on July 11, 2007, and within about a week, there were three major fires burning at once in the county.

“Part of that challenge was I was really new to the area, didn’t really know the layout of the county, didn’t really have a lot of relationships built,” Mullaney said. “That was part of the challenge but it was also probably what allowed me to make a lot of the relationships that I have made ... I got to know a lot of people in a very short period of time than I would have had we not had the fires.”

ALONG WITH HER JOB, Mullaney also prefers the Flathead to the other areas she has lived, and that is part of what keeps her around.

“Number one, the people here are friendlier,” she said. “I lived in San Francisco in one place for seven or eight years and I never knew my neighbors. That just doesn’t happen here. It’s easier to meet people and form relationships here.”

Mullaney also pointed out what she saw as obvious — the natural landscape of the valley, the mountains, Glacier National Park and all the other things that draw people to Flathead County.

“I also like the fact that it’s not so overpopulated,” she said, laughing as she added “San Francisco and Los Angeles were — oh my god.”

MULLANEY also teaches several courses in the two-year-old emergency management degree program at Flathead Valley Community College, the only one of its kind in the state.

This semester, Mullaney has been teaching mitigation planning, emergency operations center management and volunteers/donation management.

“I love it,” she said. “We haven’t had a lot of students yet, about four or five this year, but we’ve seen the numbers going up.”

The school is already offering quite a bit of online content, and Mullaney said the school is also looking to offer more opportunities for distance education.

Teaching the class has also shown Mullaney — even if she doesn’t quite believe it — the depth of her knowledge in the field.

“Some people the other day referred to me as a ‘subject matter expert,’” she joked.

But the moniker seems to be true, and, at least for the foreseeable future, Mullaney will be at the helm, using her expertise to keep residents of the Flathead safe.