Emergency Management
More to Come
An incident that runs for days is a different problem from one that runs for hours. Emergency management technology is mostly about holding a shared picture across agencies that do not share systems, tracking requests and resources at a scale no whiteboard holds, and producing the record that pays for the recovery afterwards. It also has to keep working when the building it normally runs from has been evacuated.
What technology needs to solve
We are running an emergency operations center on phone calls, whiteboards and spreadsheets
The picture in the EOC, the picture in the field and the picture at the partner agency drift apart within hours, and reconciling them consumes the staff who should be making decisions.
We cannot track resource requests and mutual aid at scale
Requests are made by phone and remembered by the person who made them, so nobody can say what was ordered, what arrived, what it is doing now, or what it has cost.
We cannot reach the public with something they will act on
A warning that reaches the wrong area, arrives in one language, or reads as routine gets ignored, and the next real one is ignored with it.
Damage assessment and reimbursement records get assembled after the fact
Recovery money turns on documentation nobody was collecting while it mattered, and the department carries costs it could have recovered.
What good should look like
- The common operating picture is readable by agencies that do not use your software.
- A resource request can be traced from request to arrival to demobilization.
- The system works when the building it lives in has been evacuated.
- Plans are current and reachable by people who did not write them.
- Public alerting reaches people who never downloaded anything.
- Cost and damage records meet the standard the reimbursement will be audited against.
- It degrades to paper without losing the incident.
- Somebody has used it outside an exercise before it is needed.