Employee Spotlight: Colleen Brennan, Airport Operations Emergency Manager

Colleen Brennan still remembers the trips to visit her father at the airport. As an Aircraft Rescue Firefighter at Southwest Florida International Airport (RSW), Colleen’s dad would take her out on the runways and into the big ARFF fire trucks. During hurricanes threatening South Florida, she sheltered at the airport fire station with her family.

She never imagined that years later she would be helping to plan for hurricanes and other disasters as the Emergency Manager for Tampa International Airport.

Brennan graduated from Florida State University in Tallahassee, where she studied criminology for her undergraduate degree. She took an internship with Florida’s Division of Emergency Management just weeks before Hurricane Irma, a massive Category 5 storm that threatened the entire state of Florida. This would be just the first in a series of major storms to impact Florida during her time working for the state.

“Just getting to see that huge state activation happen early on in my internship really made me fall in love with the field,” said Brennan.

After her time in Tallahassee, the hurricanes continued as Brennan signed up to work with FEMA through the AmeriCorps program. She spent time helping in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, which caused devastating flooding in North Carolina, and after Hurricane Michael, which leveled Mexico Beach in Florida’s panhandle. She even obtained her forklift operator’s license while working in a FEMA distribution center.

“I was able to help with disaster housing and volunteer with nonprofit work,” says Brennan, who went on to graduate with a Master’s Degree in Public Administration with a focus on Homeland Security. This unique combination of experience and education made Colleen a perfect fit for helping airports prepare for almost any emergency, whether man-made or natural.

“I never really thought about working at an airport until I got deeper into emergency management,” recalled Brennan. She said that even with her extensive background dealing with hurricanes and other disasters, working at an airport would be a totally different challenge with a whole new set of acronyms to learn.

“Emergency management has its own alphabet soup,” Brennan laughed. “Now I’m trying to mix that in with all the airport lingo, and that’s been a pretty big challenge in my brain,” which she says has been a blast.

“I get to learn something new every day while bringing in knowledge from my background. It’s been so much fun.”

Brennan began her career at TPA in February, and in just her first six months on the job, she’s been spearheading the planning for the airport’s upcoming Triennial Exercise on Sept. 17.

The full-scale emergency exercise is a requirement of the FAA and must be completed by all commercial airports once every 36 months.

“We’re bringing everyone together, from the airport to our federal, state, and local partners. Everyone will be involved in this scenario to help identify any gaps in our planning, coordination, or communication,” said Brennan.

“What’s key here is that we know who we’re talking to and that we have those relationships with the community partners. They know how to access our sites and integrate into our response operations.”

TPA’s Triennial exercise next week will involve a simulated collision between two aircraft, with a fire on the airfield and another smaller aircraft down in Tampa Bay.

“We wanted to be sure to include a water rescue component in this exercise, which will require assistance from community partners like the Tampa Police, the U.S. Coast Guard, and others,” said Brennan. “Having two separate scenes definitely complicates the response for everyone. Communication will be key.”

TPA’s communications team plans to alert the public ahead of next week’s exercise, informing those in the vicinity of the airport to expect to see smoke coming from the airfield, along with emergency vehicles and helicopters around the airport and Courtney Campbell Causeway while the exercise is taking place.

But it’s not just aircraft emergencies that Brennan needs to help planning for and managing. With nearly 80,000 passengers a day passing through and 10,000 employees, TPA operates like a miniature city, and the list of possible emergencies is nearly endless.

Part of her role includes updating operational checklists for almost any emergency imaginable, ensuring they are easy to read and aligned with emergency management best practices.

“I have a lot of binders,” says Brennan, referring to all the plans. Other responsibilities include formalizing an exercise and training program for all of the airport’s various departments, including Police, Maintenance, IT, and any other department that may be called in to respond to a crisis at the airport.

Even a shutdown of the airport’s SkyConnect train can require the activation of the Airport’s Emergency Operations Center as crews rush to set up an elaborate bus operation to move passengers between the Main Terminal, Economy Parking, and the Rental Car Center until the trains can be brought back into service.

“Incidents here scale up and down faster than any emergency management department I’ve ever worked for,” says Brennan, reflecting on the fast-paced environment of a major international airport.

Colleen’s father, who still works as an ARFF firefighter in Fort Myers, couldn’t be prouder of his daughter.

“When I started applying for this job, he got really excited, which made me even more excited,” said Brennan. “Now he and I can talk about all kinds of airport emergencies, and I know all the acronyms.”