Jim Mullen has been Director of Emergency Management for the City of Seattle since September 1992. As Director of Emergency Management, Mr. Mullen supervises the work of eight fulltime staff. Emergency Management has received a number of national awards and other recognition over the past few years for community mitigation, community preparedness, and disaster response planning.

Mr. Mullen is responsible for organizing and coordinating the annual work program of the City's Disaster Management Committee, comprising City response agencies. EM prepares and maintains the City's disaster response and readiness plan, and provides cross-departmental training for City personnel. EM assesses hazard mitigation vulnerability assessments, post exercise and real event critiques, and monitor efforts to resolve issues raised by these reports.

Mr. Mullen oversees the Auxiliary Communications Service, an amateur radio group of about 100 trained volunteers available to the City of Seattle in a crises.

Mullen also oversees the direction of the Seattle Disaster Aid and Response Teams, numbering more than 7000 volunteers in Seattle's residential neighborhoods who focus on neighborhood preparedness.

Mullen served as the original Chair of the Seattle Project Impact Steering Committee, a successful mitigation program that has been institutionalized in the City's Emergency Management budget through four ongoing programs: school retrofit, regional business mitigation, regional home retrofit, and landslide and seismic hazard mapping.