William “Bill” Roche is the Deputy Regional Administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region IX. Prior to this role, he served as the Region IX Recovery Division Director and recently led the Northern and Southern California wildfire missions as Federal Coordinating Officer.
Mr. Roche began his career with FEMA in February of 1995, as a Disaster Assistance Employee (DAE) in Individual Assistance. He spent eight years working for the Northridge Earthquake recovery operations in various roles. These roles included serving as a Public Assistance (PA) Project Specialist preparing PA grants and later becoming the Deputy PA Officer, managing the daily operations of PA closeout efforts for more than 30,000 grants.
Beginning in 2007, Bill served as the Infrastructure Branch Chief at FEMA Region IX. His responsibilities included the coordination and implementation of the PA Grant Program, coordination of other Federal agency assistance to public entities, the Fire Management Assistance Grant Program, and the Community Disaster Loan program. As the Infrastructure Branch Chief, Bill was also responsible for PA Cadre Manager duties, overseeing and coordinating the PA Disaster Assistance Employee (DAE) workforce for Region IX.
In September 2011, Bill accepted a position as the Director of the Public Assistance Division, Recovery Directorate at FEMA headquarters in Washington, DC. There, he spearheaded FEMA’s top priority to redesign the Public Assistance (PA) Grant Program to provide more efficient and effective support to state, tribal, local governments, and eligible private-nonprofits. In 2017, the PA Delivery Model became the standard way of distributing PA grants across the agency.
Throughout his 18 years in emergency management, Bill has responded to and managed response and recovery operations for more than 30 federal disasters, including the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, the Southern California Wildfires of 2003 and 2007, California Winter Storms and flooding events in 2005 and 2006, Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008, the 2009 Earthquake/Tsunami in American Samoa, and Hurricane Sandy in 2012.