Preparedness
MOVING FROM PREPARDNESS TO PREPARED
Emergency Management and emergency preparedness span a spectrum of activities that start before an incident has even occurred. Action plans, reliable communications, an inventory of materiel, and well trained staff and volunteers must all be in place and ready to deploy when disaster strikes. When it does, the first responders are dispatched to the scene for the purpose of saving lives and securing victims. This first response is what generally makes the evening news, but EMA professionals have always understood that what happens next, dealing with the aftermath, is often a far more daunting task. More recently, the aftermath – thousands of displaced persons, large scale evacuations, victims spanning multiple jurisdictions and states – has come into public awareness. What has been missing is an effective tool for orchestrating the resources and personnel needed to cope with the long term effects of the initial disaster.
EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT TODAY
As defined in the National Response Framework (NRF) issued by FEMA there are Emergency Support Functions known as ESFs. Each ESF has a primary agency together with the appropriate support agencies to fulfill their functions in an emergency.
During an emergency or incident, it is not uncommon for the Emergency Support Functions staff in an Emergency Operations Center to rely heavily on resources and people from many different agencies and organizations. The coordination and interface between these many groups is often difficult to manage, resulting in unfulfilled and/or redundant requests for resources or support. Although the EOC staff may have access to a Crisis Incident Management Software (CIMS) product, these products are not designed to manage people and resources at the functional level, making preparedness planning and incident coordination extremely difficult. Emergency Managers are left to coordinate as best they can often relying on manual processes to find and allocate the necessary resources and people.
By implementing a system specifically addressing resource and people management, multiple organizations can standardize operating procedures and adopt shared best practices. Emergency management staff is able to more readily interface to resources and people. Collaboration between organizations and emergency managers allows the best resource to be located quickly, allocated, subsequently tracked, and finally recovered to "inventory”.
News
06/01/2007 Release of version 2.3EastBanc Technologies announced the release of version 2.3 of the SOURCETRAC product.
02/06/2006Release of version 2.2EastBanc Technologies announced the release of version 2.2 of the SOURCETRAC product.