From ground zero to zero errors:
Cloud collaboration for major incident management 

Oliver Starka expands on how to navigate major events, from preparation to post-incident review


Image: robiulcc2 | Freepik 

Imagine that leaders from the most powerful countries in the world have chosen your city to host a major climate change summit.

The logistics for this summit are incredibly complex. They include securing the summit site, pre-approving and protecting the dignitaries' travel routes and hotels, strategically placing and monitoring video surveillance, mapping public areas near the summit, and preparing contingency plans for worst-case scenarios. The scale of the task is immense.

All of this must be co-ordinated among multiple agencies, not just from your city and country but from all those participating. Imagine co-ordinating security for the Paris Climate Accords in 2020, with 198 countries participating.

To accomplish all this without missing a single detail requires years of security experience and the best possible supporting technology.

Cloud-based collaboration

The technology solution is a cloud-based incident management web application that can support preparation and plan execution for the entire lifecycle of a major event, allowing multiple agencies to be on the same page.

Whether it is a major event like a climate summit or a co-ordinated response to a natural disaster, the need for a modern platform that can support co-ordination and response for an extended period is more than necessary. It is a crucial component of successful event management.

Proper planning is important; it is essential when preparing for a major event. With a web-based collaboration tool, it is possible to create a template for every conceivable contingency. When a specific event occurs – say, protestors breach the summit perimeter, or a rogue drone is spotted flying in the summit’s vicinity – leaders in the control room can just drag and drop the plan template for all to follow.

Templates can be made for multiple foreseeable events – major public gatherings, flooding, wildfires, and so on – and archived for use when something happens.

Planning, response, recovery

Flooding is the world’s most common crisis, accounting for 43 per cent of all natural disaster events and causing more than US$ one trillion in damages since 1980, according to Statista.

While response and recovery from long-term flooding events like the ones seen in Germany this year are tailor-made for cloud-based collaboration, it is difficult to know when they will transition from an incident to an event.

As storms unleash torrents of rain and rivers rise, emergency workers are likely to be dispatched through the local emergency communication center’s computer-aided dispatch system (CAD).

When that initial flash flooding becomes disaster-level flooding, the information gathered through interactions between call takers, dispatchers and first responders can easily be transferred into today’s cloud-based collaboration platforms.

From incident to event

Once transferred, the data from the CAD system can be analysed and shared among collaborating agencies – police, emergency management agencies and rescue teams, public works departments, and relief agencies such as the Red Cross.

Once the operation is started in the collaboration platform under a template for flooding, dedicated communications channels and command structures can be set up. Areas for logistics, mapping, and even press contacts can be set up, and the tasks divided.

In the field, first responders equipped with a web-enabled device, such as a notebook or tablet, can fully interact with the system, and smartphones can connect to send videos and navigate to an incident site.

Command and control over multiple agencies can be conducted for weeks, months or longer, depending on the nature of the co-ordinated action.

Detailed analysis

When it is finally over or the time comes to analyse the operation, all the data collected from start to finish is readily available. There is a communications log to keep a history of all messages and log entries from beginning to end or any time frame you desire.

On the operational area display map, a searchable timeline allows the user to view the operation from beginning to end, with tactical symbols showing how assets were deployed at a certain time.

If you need to know, for example, when command staff learned that a certain levy burst, you can search, filter, and find that information and who was on duty at a specific time. Everything is logged and time-stamped, from the initial assignment to the response and action.

In today’s digital world, there is no longer time to dig out action plans from a shelf full of dusty binders and hope that the information and contacts are not outdated. When a crisis happens, marshalling forces in a cloud-based collaboration platform is the most efficient and logical way to plan, execute, document and analyse the operation from start to finish.

For more information on cloud-based collaboration platforms, visit hxgnpublicsafety.com