Steve Cover

Meet Steve

Steve Cover is a Senior Advisor at McChrystal Group. He has served the citizens of Virginia Beach for over forty years. He is the former Deputy City Manager of Public Safety, where he provided executive oversight for the Police, Fire, EMS, 911, and Emergency Management Departments. Prior to that, he was the Fire Chief for Virginia Beach.

Steve has extensive large-scale disaster management experience from both the operational and leadership/management perspective with the Federal Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) Program. He has responded to numerous hurricane deployments, the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the Pentagon on 9/11, and the Oklahoma City Bombing. Steve served as the incident commander during a navy jet crash in 2012, impacting an entire apartment complex as the Fire Chief. As the Deputy City Manager, he oversaw the City’s response to several locally declared emergencies, such as the mass shooting in 2019, civil unrest incidents in 2020, and the pandemic and numerous storms impacting the city.

He has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Fire Administration and a Master of Public Administration. He is a graduate of the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer Program, and he received the Chief Fire Officer Designation from the Commission on Chief Fire Officer Designation. He is also a graduate of the Senior Executives in State and Local Government Program from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and he attended the Executive Leaders Program at the U.S. Center for Homeland Defense & Security at the Naval Postgraduate School.