In a very short time, the incident commander knows who he has responding to his call, when they will arrive at the EOC as well as who didn’t respond. And the system can reach out to command staff or volunteers by phone call, e-mail, text message and pager.
That sort of knowledge of where a commander’s people are isn’t necessarily available with a traditional phone tree in which 10 people each contact 10 others and so on down the line. This process can require many people to make many phone calls, tying up valuable people and time at the beginning of an incident.
Emergency responders have turned to automated incident command notification software to reach out to their staff, not only to know their status, but also to push important information out to them.
Wisconsin Emergency Management (WEM) uses E-Sponder and E-Sponder Alerts to oversee all of its EOC activations. “E-Sponder has become the actual record of the actions that were taken,” said Bill Clare, WEM’s planning section supervisor.
The agency used it last year when the state experienced major flooding. “I don’t remember how many thousands of entries we had in our log of what was going on, but we were activated 24/7 for a number of days,” Clare said.
The state purchased E-Sponder because it is a Web-based system that allows every city and county in the state to manage events, whether those events include responders from across the state or just a single county. “We here at Emergency Management in the state can manage an event. State agencies can manage events -- their aspect of that event -- so while we could be using it, [the] department of health could be using it to manage department activities toward something like H1N1. Meanwhile, all of the counties can use it, local fire departments and police departments can use it and they can use it for the same event or different events, and that can all be occurring simultaneously.
Coming to Mutual Aid
St. Charles, Mo., City Fire Chief Ernie Rhodes is involved in the St. Louis Urban Area Security Initiative and leads the St. Louis metropolitan Urban Search and Rescue team and has responded to many disasters as part of Missouri Task Force One.
Rhodes likes the software because it is Web-based and accessible anywhere the Internet is available, and it’s easy to use -- even if he hasn’t used it on a regular basis.
“When our region activates our mutual aid system, the regional commander, Greg Brown, utilizes it and he also uses it to make notifications to the mutual aid coordinators,” Rhodes said.
He took the system with him when the USAR team deployed to Piedmont, Mo., in the wake of a huge flash flood event about a year ago. “We used that to construct our incident action plans and also to help the locals get on their feet,” he said.
Features Wish List?
Clare said the software had all the features WEM wanted, with some additions to the current configurations planned for the near future. He said finalizing business processes was more of a hurdle than the software configuration.
Rhodes said he wished the system could be used to track resources, such as knowing where a particular fire engine was and who was on it.
