"When I walked in here the first time, I was floored by the volume of paper traffic -- it was unmanageable," said Troy Armstrong, chief, California Governor's Office of Emergency Services (OES), Operations Branch.
That is why OES -- which has the daunting responsibility of coordinating state-level disaster response and recovery activities in support of local government -- started casting around for a software program that could help it slice through the paperwork and allow it to concentrate more on the business of helping people.
Part of the OES solution is Lotus Notes Response Information Management System (RIMS), a Windows-based software application that combines messaging, the Internet and system management features. OES is the first agency to apply what has to date been primarily a business application to streamlining disaster response efforts.
"We were looking for a system to solve five primary business challenges," said John Bowles, chief, OES Information Technology Branch. "It needed to eliminate the backlog of resource requests, the misdirection of resources, the lagtime in status report generation, the duplication of efforts of response and recovery personnel, and provide clear historical records for reporting, training and audits."
In the past, an initial phone call from a local sheriff's department might come in, for example, reporting three people stranded on a rooftop surrounded by rising flood waters. That call -- into the OES state operations center -- would generate one paper form and a phone call to the California National Guard's crisis action center in Sacramento. On the other end of the line, the duty officer would fill out a second paper form and dispatch a helicopter to the rescue scene.
Because of the manual process, OES largely lost track of rescue operations once they tasked an agency like the National Guard to handle it, and summarizing the operation in general reports to the Governor's Office and the Legislature also became a labor-intensive process. After an emergency response is concluded, OES is required by law to generate after-action reports. Because of the difficulty of manually gathering information from the various agencies involved and retyping that information onto a new set of forms, OES spent an average of $25,000 per disaster on the after-action reports alone.
"The system worked fine with one or two calls coming in, but we ran into problems when we had 10, 20 or 30 calls in an hour, which is the norm in major disasters," said Armstrong, who once worked in the National Guard crisis center and has been at OES for about three years. "In California, we have the resources to get you pretty much anything you need, but it might take some time. We had no way of prioritizing the calls coming in with a major disaster, so if there was a demand for 20 helicopters in Northern California and we only had 10, there was no way to accurately prioritize who should get help first -- where people were going to die if they didn't get help immediately -- and who could wait until 10 more copters came up from Southern California. It was very tough to make those kind of assessments, plan ahead and efficiently allocate resources when it meant wading through piles of paperwork or using a hand-updated status board that was a dozen calls behind."
RIMS
Then RIMS went online, and some of those challenges faded away. "The difference between this and winter 1995 is amazing," said Bowles. "1995 was chaos, people just wading through thousands of sticky notes."
With the system, which is connected to 90 percent of California's counties as well as numerous disaster response agencies, that first request-for-aid call is logged right onto the computer, immediately generating the appropriate forms for response and later evaluation. And Internet access to RIMS is bi-directional, allowing local governments, the media and the public access to information. Authorized users throughout the state are able to interactively fill out and update forms. So, if a rescue call is generated from Santa Cruz -- probably via e-mail -- the National Guard will see the demand coming even before they are actually tasked by OES to respond.
"A lot of times we see the tasking order coming up the line even before we get verbal contact," said Capt. Richard Rabe with the National Guard Crisis Action Center. "That is a big help in planning, and once the tasking form is listed on the computer we have complete and accurate information. That is something we didn't always get when people were relying on short telephone conversation in the heat of the moment. Also, since the initiating agency is usually utilizing RIMS themselves, we can check for up-to-date status reports while our helos are enroute, rather than having to call OES and track down the right staff person to find out what has changed. The information is more timely and accessible, which means we can do our job better here as well."
With RIMS, not only is the information available immediately to responding agencies, but it is also automatically updated to the forms that are needed to evaluate ongoing disaster response efforts, future recovery needs and post-disaster assessments. RIMS helped coordinate more than 50 minor disasters in its first year of operation, including fires, plane crashes, train derailments, winter storms, the Long Beach oil spill and the Yosemite rock slide. But it got a true test of its ability during the 1997 New Year's flood disaster that submerged Northern and Central California under several feet of water. During that challenging time, RIMS was used to coordinate thousands of resources, hundreds of developing situations and calls for help from 46 counties. In each case the system worked beautifully, allowing response personnel to access valuable information at the click of an icon.
Would you like a ranked listing of which areas have the most homes immediately threatened by flooding? The table is only three clicks away. Want a running tab on how much damage the flooding has caused so far or the status of emergency shelters available throughout the state? Click, click, you're there.
"The best aspect we found with Notes was that we can make it do everything we want it to. Its data replication and remote access capabilities are excellent, enabling users to simultaneously make changes for all users on the system. And the ability to automatically update and disseminate information to several levels of emergency management at once eliminates a lot of lagtime," said Armstrong.
Through eliminating lagtime and the need to duplicate work, RIMS helped OES reduce costs and response times, as well as allowing it to produce more accurate reports faster than ever before. Assuming a standard baseline response load for OES, the agency anticipates a cost reduction of $619,000 annually for a system that cost $250,000 to install, and reduced resource request processing time by 75 percent. As the system is expanded for use in processing disaster recovery claims, grant processing and other non-emergency uses, RIMS document management and workflow capabilities could end up saving OES more than $1 million a year. More important than the money though, is what RIMS has done for the agency's ability to learn and grow.
"We get a new lesson with every disaster and now we can apply them. If we don't like something or need a new form or table to help manage our work, we can create it within the program in less than an hour and it doesn't cost us an extra dime," said an enthusiastic Armstrong. "It's like the software is learning right along with us."
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Someone is
trapped on a
roof and flood
waters are rising.
Response must
be swift and
prioritized with
other calls for
help. Groupware
can lend a hand.
SOLUTION SUMMARY
PROBLEM/SITUATION: Unmanageable paperwork for disaster agency.
SOLUTION: Groupware.
JURISDICTION: California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, California National Guard.
VENDORS: Lotus Notes, IBM, Microsoft, Novell.
CONTACT: Internet:
California Office of Emergency Services, municipalities and other disaster relief agencies are utilizing Lotus Notes Remote Information Management System 4.5. RIMS is a versatile software application that supports IBM OS/2, IBM AIX, Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, Sun Solaris, HP-UX and Novell Netware.
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