We cannot run the emergency operations centre if the building is unavailable

The plan assumes a room. When that room is flooded, without power, inside the evacuation zone or simply unreachable, the coordination that room was doing stops, and it stops at the moment it is most needed.

Technology approaches

Virtual and distributed EOC

Running coordination from wherever people are: the same boards, logs, tasks and picture, without the room.

Before you buy

  • Ask what it needs to work. A cloud product is no use in a jurisdiction whose internet is out, however healthy the vendor's data centre is.
  • Ask whether it has ever been used outside an exercise.

Degraded and offline operation

Continuing to run, and continuing to keep a record, when the network, the power or the primary system is gone.

Before you buy

  • Ask what the paper fallback is, and whether the incident record can be reconstructed from it afterwards.
  • Ask what can be printed before an incident, and whether anybody has printed it.