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The Emergency Management Take: Fall 2021
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The Emergency Management Take with Bruce Fitzgerald
FirstNet innovates disaster recovery
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This is the third installment in our series about how FirstNet helps with the four phases of emergency management – preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. I’d like to dive deeper into how FirstNet helps with the recovery phase.
Communicating during the recovery phase
Every year, disasters put millions of Americans in danger and cost billions of dollars in property damage. After the threat of harm from a disaster has passed, the recovery phase starts. Recovery can take months or years to get a community back on its feet. It’s critical to quickly start damage assessments and applications for financial assistance following a disaster.
FirstNet plays an important role in the recovery phase. While a community is assessing damage, repairing and rebuilding infrastructure, and restoring critical functions, FirstNet keeps responders connected and communicating, speeding up some steps of the recovery process.
Switching to FirstNet helps recovery
I recently spoke with Shawn Rogers, Director of the Cherokee County Emergency Management Agency in Alabama. Cherokee County is a geographically diverse area with a 33,000-acre lake. The county is often affected by extreme weather events like hurricanes, tornadoes, and tropical storms.
In the past, responders in Cherokee County would start post-disaster recovery efforts by going into the community with pen and paper to assess damage. Recovery crews would walk between houses surveying damage, injuries, and hazards, hand-writing notes about their findings. Then they’d return to the office to manually enter data into a computer.
Rogers said, “In 2018, we swapped over to FirstNet and immediately saw how beneficial it was going to be to not only our planning and preparation, but also our response, mitigation, and recovery.”
Streamlining damage assessments
Today, the Cherokee County recovery teams use apps on tablets powered by FirstNet to do damage assessments in real-time.
“Now, with FirstNet, we have damage assessment software,” said Rogers. “So instead of pen and paper, we go out with our connected devices, whether it's an iPad or a Surface Pro or whatever it may be, and we're able to document from those devices, take photos, upload those into the program. As soon as the program syncs, the state emergency operations center has full visibility of what we've got going on in the counties.”
FirstNet as a force multiplier
Using FirstNet-enabled technology allows the emergency management team to partner with other responders for damage assessments. Rogers assigns a username and password, and then responders download apps to their devices.
When police officers or fire officials are out in the community and see damage, they only need to snap a photo, enter some information, and hit submit. Then the damage is shown live in the emergency operations center. This approach is a significant force multiplier in getting the overall disaster declaration process underway as quickly as possible – no need to wait for emergency management teams to be organized before beginning to asses damages.
Working with FEMA
Using FirstNet-enabled damage assessment software during recovery speeds up the process of working with FEMA. FEMA looks at damage assessments to determine if the area should be declared a major disaster. A major disaster declaration provides a wide range of federal assistance programs for individuals and public infrastructure.
“When you've got 10 counties that are affected from a single event, if you can get all of those counties using the program to upload their damages, the state emergency management agency is able to [complete the federal disaster request] a lot quicker than us having to write it down on paper,” explained Rogers. “They're able to look at the dollar value of the loss and compile their reports to FEMA a lot quicker.”
Resources for emergency managers
My colleagues and I at the FirstNet Authority have developed an Emergency Management Resource Guide. The guide helps emergency managers understand how to use FirstNet products, services, and capabilities in every phase of emergency management, including the recovery phase.
What questions do you have about FirstNet and the emergency management cycle? Send me an email. Or find me or my colleagues at one of these events:
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FirstNet’s Z-axis capability gives first responders 3D location information not available with traditional GPS. In addition to latitude and longitude coordinates, Z-axis provides altitude data to vertically locate first responders in tall buildings.
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Tech, Innovations, and Hot Topics in Emergency Management
Read what we’ve been hearing from public safety in the field about trends and drivers for emergency management and emergency communications.*
Geospatial technology organizations are developing advanced open-source data and technology tools to help communities with disaster response, disaster risk reduction, and post-disaster assessments. Tools like on-site remote sensing and spatially-enabled damage assessment programs help front-line responders to collect data during a disaster. Open-source mapping and data tools are also bringing mapping capabilities to people in communities affected by disasters.
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At the annual Winter Institute Workshop and Exercise, hosted by the Texas A&M University’s Internet 2 Technology Evaluation Center (ITEC), public safety officials evaluate technologies in real-life scenarios to help shape future technologies and research. During the 2020 exercise, participants practiced integrating new technologies, including a FirstNet deployable, into disaster operations during a simulated cyberattack.
Watch the video |
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Bruce Fitzgerald is the First Responder Network Authority Emergency Management Subject Matter Expert. Learn more about Bruce or email him with your questions. |
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*FirstNet Authority may provide hyperlinks for third-party, non-governmental websites in order to offer additional context and added value for our users. FirstNet Authority does not endorse any product or service and is not responsible, nor can it guarantee the validity or timeliness of the content on hyperlinks outside of the federal government. In addition, users may wish to review privacy notices on non-government sites since their information collection practices may differ from ours.
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