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Arizona's Gilbert Fire Department Demonstrates Power and Ease of New System
in National DHS Exercise
This article is available in PDF:
The Challenge
- Eliminate cumbersome manual and paper processes within EOC
- Establish means of monitoring and managing crisis response in real time.
- Get personnel up to speed quickly and easily on new system
The Solution
- Essential Emergency™
The Results
- Local agency EOC fulfilled role in national exercise with minimal preparation
- Easy transition from paper processes to powerful automated system.
- Staff/volunteers used system successfully in minutes with minimal training
- Increased interoperability and communication between organizations.
Since it was founded in 1892, the town of Gilbert, Arizona has grown from a small farming community into an affluent suburb of Phoenix. In 1970, Gilbert had a population of only 1,971 people. Today that number has grown to over 200,000. As the community grew, the Gilbert Fire Department recognized that its Emergency Operations Center (EOC) needed for a more sophisticated data management and communications system. After a careful search, the department's leadership team selected Essential Emergency software from ESS.
"The ESS software's ability to help us manage personnel and resource deployment, communications and task assignments in real time was a huge draw for us," said Sheri Gibbons emergency management coordinator of the Gilbert Fire Department. "Equally important is the fact that it's easy to learn and easy to use. Some of our personnel only get the chance to train and exercise with us a few times each year so the system wouldn't be much good to us if it's hard to understand and requires a lot of hands on, remedial training."
Until September of 2007, the Gilbert Fire Department had always used paper spreadsheets and forms to track data and coordinate EOC activities. But as demands on the department grew, that approach became impractical. "It takes a lot of time and effort," Gibbons said. "Trying to track all of that information on paper can be a nightmare."
With Essential Emergency, a wealth of critical information is immediately accessible and manageable online. Users of the ESS' software typically report performing tasks that used to take hours in a matter of minutes or seconds. During a real-time response, for example the system allows an EOC to track emergency personnel certifications, determine which team members are available for deployment and how/when they've been deployed. Online mapping tools provide detailed views of incident locations. Essential Emergency also allows separate organizations to share information in order to collaborate on response operations.
Gilbert's installation of the ESS system was put to the test immediately during TOPOFF (for "Top Official"), a major exercise supervised by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Held October 15-24 at several venues in Arizona and Oregon, TOPOFF was designed to strengthen the nation's capacity to prevent, protect against, respond to and recover from terrorist attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. It provided an opportunity for local, state, and federal agencies to coordinate emergency preparedness efforts. There were over 10,000 participants, including officials from Arizona and Oregon; overseas support from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Guam; with full-scale tests of collective preparedness, and interoperability.
The Gilbert Fire Department and its new information system both received strong positive reviews for their roles in the exercise. "Our TOPOFF evaluator was surprised and pleased by the ESS software's ease of use. With little hands on training, our staff was quickly oriented to the software and able to use it comfortably within a matter of minutes. That means a lot when lives are at stake." Gibbons said.
