Emergency Management Assistance Compact Activations

Congress authorized and all 50 states have adopted the Emergency Management Assistance Compact - also known as EMAC.  EMAC requests for assistance are State to State.  The governor of one state makes a request thru the governor of another state for specific assistance.  The responding state may (or may not) respond to the request.  For more specifics on EMAC, please see its website at www.emacweb.org.

It is important to note that local law enforcement agencies in Illinois should NEVER self-dispatch to out-of-state disasters without authorization from the State of Illinois Emergency Management Agency or ILEAS acting on its behalf. 

Reimbursement

The responding state submits a reimbursement request to the requesting state for expenses incurred during the mutual aid activation.  There are extensive reimbursement rules and policies that govern how this process works.  In the past, the Illinois Emergency Management Agency has requested that ILEAS collect the reimbursement requests from each responding agency. ILEAS then submits the entire invoice to Illinois.  Illinois then pays ILEAS and ILEAS pays the responding agencies.  Participating agency will be reimbursed only for allowable expenses. Allowable costs, include but are not limited to: 

• Mileage
• Lodging
• per diem
• Pay 
• Other authorized expenses such as damaged or destroyed equipment and consumables

Worker's Compensation

When sent to another state as part of an official EMAC request, responding agency staff become State of Illinois assets and as such, they are covered by the State of Illinois for worker's compensation.  

Authority

Part of the written agreement between the two states, the requesting state must outline how it is to provide police authority to officers from the responding state.  During the Louisiana EMAC deployment, responding officers were sworn in as Louisiana State Police Officers.

ILEAS Policy

ILEAS has determined that generally the first assets to be sent to stricken states are the ILEAS multi-jurisdictional Mobile Field Force Teams and/or the WMD Special Response Teams - depending on the nature of the request.  ILEAS can also reach out to EOD Teams, IL-TERT teams or any other resource requested by the responding state.