AAC F A M I L Y & F R I E N D S
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Opposite Page: ADEM Director David Maxwell and Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson assess flood damage caused by heavy rains in June 2015 in Southwest Arkansas. Above: Reporters questions Maxwell and Gov. Hutchinson, who is standing next to Miller County Judge Larry Burgess.
It’s a pretty distinguished career for a man who never intended to make emergency management his life’s work. “It was an accident,” Maxwell said of his career choice. He was a job-hunting sociology graduate in September 1978, when heavy rains caused major flooding in Little Rock. His uncle called and told Maxwell there were positions available for caseworkers for a program that provided assistance to flood victims. “I told him I was a sociologist, not a caseworker,” Maxwell said.
“He pointed out that I was an unemployed sociologist.” Te following April, two tornadoes hit Hamburg just days
apart, and Maxwell was part of the emergency assistance effort there too. One day a woman came into his office to ask for his help. She and her husband had lost their home to the first tor- nado, and the second tornado hit the mobile home they’d moved into and soaked everything they had left. Her husband was also dying of cancer, and she’d just found out that their application for emergency assistance had been taken out of the system. Max- well was livid. He not only reinstated her application, he issued an immediate order to set up another mobile home for them — before they were even officially back in the system.
COUNTY LINES, SPRING 2016 “I was able to help her, but I got in trouble,” he said. “I would
fire an employee for that today. Maybe. I wouldn’t authorize it, I’ll say that.” Soon he was hired as a planning specialist for the Department
of Emergency Management, and spent the next two decades rising through the ranks. In 2002 he was promoted to deputy director by then-director Bud Harper, a former Sebastian county judge. “Disasters kind of get in your blood,” he said, explaining why
he never went back to his original career choice. “Everything I’d done up to that point — school, working at the soil conserva- tion agency — I was never able to see the results of any work I’d done. With this, I got immediate gratification. I saw results. I put people in housing. It really kind of grabbed me.” Maxwell’s almost four-decade career has spanned an enormous amount of change within the emergency management field. When he started, the Cold War loomed large and nuclear disasters were a major focus. As that threat faded, planning officials were able to concentrate more on natural and manmade disasters, Maxwell
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