How Selwyn District EOC Is Using D4H To Overcome Natural Disasters

Customer Background

The South Island of New Zealand is no stranger to natural disasters. In the last few years, Selwyn District has faced significant challenges from wildfires to earthquakes, snowstorms, and flooding. The local emergency management team based at Selwyn District Council manages the response to these events.

The Challenge

Without suitable software for their Emergency Operations Centre (EOC), staff struggled to effectively collate and manage information during an emergency. EOC staff were working from different spreadsheets and text documents and sharing information via email where it quickly became out of date. It was an ongoing challenge for the EOC to maintain situational awareness and share information with other agencies.

The Solution

Having experience with D4H from using D4H Personnel & Training to track staff and volunteer training, Selwyn District Council decided to deploy D4H Incident Management in February 2018 to help with the management of incidents in their EOC.

Just a couple of weeks later New Zealand was hit by ex-tropical cyclone Gita, leading to a declared emergency and a response led by the EOC over a 36 hour period. Ryan O’Rourke, team leader for emergency management at Selwyn District Council, made the decision to rush 34 staff through a one-hour familiarization session with D4H Incident Management the day before the storm was forecast to hit.

“D4H worked amazingly well – the staff were overwhelmingly positive about the product and found it very intuitive and useful. It has considerably improved situational awareness within our EOC and I believe it has also helped to achieve our objectives, by maintaining focus and tracking tasks better during the operation. Some of the staff on the operation had not even attended the one-hour familiarization session, but were given a login and a few tips and were using the system within a few minutes. Our partner agencies, emergency services, and political leaders have also been very impressed with the live SITREP we were able to share, and with our overall situational awareness in the EOC.”
— Ryan O’Rourke, Emergency Management Team Leader, Selwyn District Council

During the operation, the public information team requested a way to track and manage media inquiries on D4H.

“I was able to create a new info-manager form for them within 10 minutes and they began using it straight away. I’m blown away that I was able to do this and make it live in the middle of the operation. From an audit and accountability point of view, it’s amazing to have a nicely presented package of PDFs and a brilliant log, as opposed to various books and scraps of paper that I get left with after other operations. It’s helped us step up to a higher level of performance and I’m excited about the future of D4H Incident Management.”
— Ryan O’Rourke, Emergency Management Team Leader, Selwyn District Council