Arizona's Tempe Fire Dept Enhances Communications to Support National Exercise and 150+ Events Per Year
This article is available in PDF:
As Arizona's eighth largest city with a population of 169,712, the City of Tempe hosts an unusually large number and variety of public events, from local to global in scope. It is the home of Arizona State University and the corporate headquarters of US Airways. The city regularly hosts major sporting events ranging from Super Bowl XXX to Major League Baseball spring training to major collegiate championships. Other events have ranged from popular rock concerts to political events such as the 2004 U.S. Presidential debates.
The Challenge
- Enhance department's ability to support more than 150 public events each year.
- Establish means of managing crisis planning and response in real time.
- Get personnel up to speed quickly and easily on new system.
The Solution
- Essential Emergency™
The Results
- Department EOC fulfilled role in national emergency response exercise
- More proactive management thanks to remote access, near real time data entry.
- Stronger record keeping/communications between department and other agencies.
- Accelerates reimbursement from other agencies by collecting/communicating needed data in half the time
As a result, the Tempe Fire Department is accustomed to assuming responsibility for critical emergency planning and response operations associated with major public events. In fact, Tempe Fire Department, "the first internationally accredited department in the nation," provides all-hazard emergency management support to more than 150 local and national events in a typical year.
In October 2007, when the fire department was given the opportunity to coordinate with local, state, and federal agencies during the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)-supervised TOPOFF 4 exercise, the City's fire chief, Cliff Jones, knew the time was right to expand his department's response systems.
Short for "Top Official, TOPOFF 4 called on representatives from Arizona and Oregon -- with overseas support from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Guam -- to conduct full-scale tests of collective preparedness and interoperability. The exercise was designed to strengthen the nation's capacity to prevent, protect against, respond to and recover from terrorist attacks involving weapons of mass destruction.
Jones said the Tempe Fire Department selected Essential Emergency software from ESS because it gives them the ability to work remotely from the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and in near-real time. The new system helps his team respond to incidents and strengthens their ability to plan for their response several hours in advance. "ESS software has allowed our department to be more proactive because it lets me see what volunteers in the EOC are planning over the course of a 24-hour period, even when I have to be out in the field," he said.
He said the system's ability to access pre-loaded checklists and forms allowed his team to respond more quickly and easily to governmental inquiries. "The planning process leading up to TOPOFF really showed the strength of the ESS software," Jones said. "It gives you a way to organize and provide information to everyone from our EOC volunteers to the federal government as soon as they ask for it."
During and after TOPOFF, the system strengthened record keeping and communications between the Fire Department and other city departments including human resources, public works, water, police, the city attorney and the city manager's office. "ESS software even helps expedite the processing of reimbursements from other government agencies," Jones said. "All of the record keeping is done so we've got the facts we need at our fingertips during and after our response operations."
