Deborah Mills

Deborah Mills, a forest engineer, served as Virginia's State hazard mitigation officer and Recovery & Mitigation Division director at the end of her 31-year Commonwealth career. She has 48 years of environmental engineering, floodplain management, and emergency management experience. At Virginia Department of Emergency Management, she advocated for and facilitated funding and ultimate completion of dozens of multi-jurisdictional and Disaster Resistant Hazard Mitigation Plans and managed updates of several dozen more as a Dewberry consultant. Her Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Hazard Mitigation Grant Program expertise facilitated management of technical reviews for FEMA and completion of FEMA mitigation grant applications which have been funded in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas, and Massachusetts. She served FEMA Public Assistance for a year as a supervisor of twelve Program Delivery Managers in the role of Task Force Lead during 2017 – 2018 Hurricane Harvey recovery in Houston Texas. In this capacity, she worked with FEMA staff and participating state and local agencies and Non-Government Organizations. She is a veteran of more than 30 disaster deployments including Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey. She has supported FEMA during the 2021 COVID Vaccination Clinics and later disasters in Continuous Improvement as well as development of numerous FEMA Building Science technical publications and training. She most recently was a co-author of a residential floodproofing publication and training. In her spare-time she travels the American and Canadian Rockies with her godsons, is an avid gardener and "mom" to two spaniels.