B etween meetings at her internship this summer, Elizabeth Czarick, ’23, talked about missing persons, radiation attacks and disaster prep.
 
She has just finished an internship with the Gwinnett County Office of Emergency Management. She can now graduate with a public health degree from Georgia College & State University and move on to her master’s in Health and Human Performance.
 
As a unit of the Gwinnett County Police Department, the agency plans for emergencies, coordinates response resources and assists the public in recovery following a disaster.

Her first project was identifying the critical infrastructure located at 2,000 different addresses. This was crucial for the county’s hazard mitigation plan which was due for its five-year update.
 
Czarick worked with Deputy Director of the agency, Michael Shaw, and met with representatives from municipal utilities and agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, Georgia Department of Health and American Red Cross.

At a conference in Marietta, she also learned about disaster response to radiation and the coordination required between critical agencies to prevent catastrophes.
 
“I think the internship site was the best place I could have picked,” Czarick said. “Most of the emergency management agencies I saw were for the city. Working with the county as a whole, I got to see it more in-depth. The county works with all the cities, metro Atlanta and other offices as well.”

Working with police, fire and health services showed her the impact disasters have on a community’s public health, and how hard people work behind the scenes to avert emergencies. 

“I’ve seen how much they work together, so I feel like I could work with them too,” Czarick said. “I’m glad I interned here, because they were all amazing, and I discovered how much emergency management ties into public health.” 

She traveled with the team wherever they went, including on a search and rescue training mission for their Deputy Director. 

“I was just going to tag along for a missing-persons search, and we ended up going to his last-known address in Duluth, Georgia,” Czarick said. “We were using a Project Lifesaver device to ping his transmitter. I got to watch everyone, but they let me try it too. I was able to get hands-on experience simulating a missing person search.”

They found their man in little over an hour.

This fall, Czarick plans to put her knowledge to good use in Georgia College’s Health and Human Performance master’s program. She’ll specialize in health promotion, learning more about how to protect communities.

“If bad things were to happen, it’s good to know those emergency plans are there to look back on,” she said. “Somebody had been thinking about the well-being of everybody in the county.”