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www.urban-forestry.com 23 In January of 2009 another devastating ice storm hit the states of Arkansas, Missouri, and Kentucky. UFST crews responded to several communities in Arkansas and Kentucky over a four-week period. Since 2009 there have been no multi-state devastating storms in the South, although UFSTs have respond- ed in-state to more localized storm events in North Carolina and Virginia. Therefore, the focus of the UFST program has been training and increasing the number of trained individuals in southern state forestry agen- cies. There have been trainings in Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, Georgia, and North Carolina. Also, the 23-state Northeast Area of the U.S. Forest Service started to build UFST capacity under the lead- ership of New England Urban Forestry Coordinator John Parry and Midwest Urban Forestry Coordinator Jill Johnson. Their first training was held in Leominster, Massachusetts in the fall of 2009. The Northeast Area has since conducted trainings in Delaware, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Portsmouth, NH, and most recently Columbus, Ohio. While the composition of UFSTs in the southern region is almost exclusively made up of state forestry agency personnel, the Northeast Area has offered training primarily to municipal and commercial arborists in addition to state forestry agency arborists. The number of UFST members from the combined regions now totals about 300. These numbers will allow a broader and more rapid response to the next major multi-state storm event. Because there have been no major deployments in the past few years, it has been necessary to keep UFST skills fresh. To accomplish this, mock exercises were initiated in 2013. The first of these was held in the Tidewater cities of Virginia. The exercise was very successful and was well received in the local cities by the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and even by local media that ran several newspaper and TV stories. Significantly, we were able to deploy the UFSTs through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) Coordinators in the participating states. Subsequent mock exercises have been held in Savannah, Georgia and Fayetteville, Arkansas. The mock exercises provide the opportunity to improve on our operations and introduce and test new technology. The UFST program has also adopted the ANSI A300 Tree Risk Assessment standards. Originally UFST crews assessed storm-damaged tree risk based on the 12-point system developed in Matheny and Clark's A Photographic Guide to the Evaluation of Hazard Trees in Urban Areas. Now, for consistency, many UFST team leaders are Tree Risk Assessment Qualified (TRAQ) and Task specialist records data on large tree damaged in Arkansas ice storm. the goal is to have all team leaders TRAQ qualified over the next few years. Consistent funding for UFSTs is still a work in progress. FEMA will reimburse communities for tree damage doc- umented by UFSTs but has still not committed to cover deployment costs. To date, deployment costs have been funded out of U.S. Forest Service storm supplemental allocations. Funding in the South over the next three years will also be covered by a U.S. Forest Service grant. However, the program is developing strong connections with state EMAC coordinators. Both in-state and out-of- state deployments coordinated through EMAC should qualify for payment by state emergency management agencies. We all hope we never see the next multi-state natural disaster, but one is sure to occur sooner or later. When that happens, affected municipal forestry programs now have a resource they can call on to help recover. For more detailed information on the Urban Forest Strike Team Program, go to www.ufst.org. (left) GIS maps are provided to each community by the Urban Forest Strike Team. Maps are accompanied by a table that shows location, species, DBH, and FEMA-related data.