08/31/2026
Emergency management runs on knowing who to call before anyone needs to call them, and two Coast Guard members who have spent their careers in the work said the trait that makes that possible is humility.
Mickey Sanders, a bridge management specialist for the U.S. Coast Guard East District, and Lt. Nicolas Herbert, a project officer for Atlantic Area’s Incident Management Division, each described a job that depends less on any one person's expertise than on knowing where the expertise sits and being willing to ask for it.
That habit is what makes a response work, and it is largely invisible from the outside. By the time an incident happens, the that carry it have already been built.
Sanders and Herbert met through the joint training program that qualifies members to coach the Incident Command System ( ), and the mentorship that started there has carried through both men's retirements and their returns to Coast Guard service.
Sanders enlisted in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1999, after he and three friends decided together to join the military and settled on the Coast Guard without knowing much about any of the branches.
"We saw a pamphlet of Coasties riding jet skis on the beach, and we were like, oh, this will be cool to do," Sanders said.
He reported aboard Coast Guard Cutter Diligence (WMEC 616), where he asked a shipmate how a person became an officer and was told he was not officer material. He gathered the information himself, used College-Level Examination Program (CLEP) testing and tuition assistance to finish his degree, and commissioned through Officer Candidate School in 2004.
His introduction to ICS came at Marine Safety Unit Savannah, where he served as chief of enforcement under a commander who made the incident action plan (IAP) part of the unit's weekly routine, with each division submitting its section and the plan signed before the week closed out.
"That was just for practice," Sanders said. "We all thought at the time it was a terrible idea."
When the unit responded to an oil spill on the Savannah River, at a point when the Incident Command System was still unfamiliar across much of the Coast Guard, the members had already written the same document dozens of times and were able to stand up a unified command with their partners quickly.
"That was my introduction to ICS," Sanders said. "Being forced into it, and then actually coming to like it."
Sanders said the system works because of how it sorts expertise, and that the arrangement only holds if the people using it are willing to ask.
"ICS is not based on rank. It's based on knowledge," Sanders said.
Herbert grew up in Norfolk and has lived in the region for most of his life, which has put him near much of the large-scale event work the Coast Guard supports along the Atlantic coast. He joined the Coast Guard in 2000. He served as the tactical action officer for Port Security Unit 301 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2019, and was assigned to the Coast Guard Incident Management Assist Team from 2021 to 2024, where he was pulled in as the Atlantic Area liaison during the COVID-19 response.
Like Sanders, Herbert faced early doubts about his potential, and both men built their careers by refusing to let those moments define them. Now, they provide the kind of guidance and support they once had to find on their own, offering resources and encouragement to Coast Guard members at every level.
Both men came up through the training the Coast Guard IMAT and the Atlantic Area Incident Management Division run to qualify their reserve components, a process in which members take a course once as students and then take it again while being evaluated on their ability to teach it. Before Herbert could instruct other units, he had to deliver a section of the course in front of the active-duty staff and be graded on it.
"As a , you feel like you have to prove yourself sometimes," Herbert said. "Hey, I can do this job. You can trust and send me out into the field and teach people and not worry about me teaching the wrong subject."
Herbert said the requirement to stay ready to teach has made him better at the work itself, because the material has to be current in his own head before he can put it in anyone else's.
"Anything dealing with teaching, you have to love it," Herbert said. "You know it right off the bat, first 10 minutes, whether this instructor really wants to be there."
Sanders described what he has watched Herbert do at an incident, where the pace leaves little room to stop and explain what is happening to members who have not seen it before.
"He brings everybody along. It's not just, I'm doing it by myself," Sanders said. "He's always grabbing people and teaching them on the spot."
Herbert said the mentorship between them has never been confined to the job, and that Sanders has made him a better coworker, a better father and a better mentor to the members who now bring their questions to him.
Herbert retired out of Sector Virginia and returned to active duty orders this summer after being asked to support large-scale events based on his work during previous responses. He will go back to his full-time role at Federal Emergency Management Agency headquarters following his orders to LANT 35IM.
Sanders is a civilian now, and his office handles construction, maintenance, repair, inspection and regulation for bridges across the district, work he describes in much the same terms he uses for emergency management. He weighs a short closure against the risk of a longer one, accounts for military, commercial and recreational traffic on the waterway, and tries to keep a problem from becoming an incident that someone else has to respond to. He no longer works in the emergency planning section, and he is still one of the people it calls. Herbert is frequently walking down to see him, just a couple floors away from his own office in the Portsmouth Federal Building.
Sanders said he encourages members to get an exercise on their record whenever they can, and to request a forward deployment to another unit if their own is not running one.
"You may never get to use it on a real event," Sanders said. "But the day you do, you're going to look back and know that exercise knowledge is going to start coming back."
The Coast Guard’s emergency managers often say that incidents are won long before they begin. Sanders and Herbert are proof of that idea: two careers built on preparation, steady practice, and the relationships that make the system work.
U.S. Coast Guard Reserve | U.S. Coast Guard
📸PA2 Kate Kilroy
