Waldo County EMA Puts Technology at the Forefront with D4H

Customer Background

The mission of the Waldo County Emergency Management Agency (EMA) is to plan and prepare for disasters and emergencies that could happen in Waldo County, Maine coordinate with other government entities, coordinate county and municipal efforts for a joint response to regional disasters and emergencies, and establish and manage an organized effort to quickly respond and recover from such disasters and emergencies.

County EMAs provide an invaluable link between the almost 500 cities and towns in Maine and the State. EMAs like Waldo County provide support and leadership in preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation to their local, business, and volunteer partners.

The Challenge

In Waldo, county emergency management is the managerial function charged with creating the framework within which the community reduces vulnerability to hazards and cope with disasters. Emergency management protects communities by coordinating and integrating all activities necessary to build, sustain, and improve the capability to mitigate against, prepare for, respond to, and recover from threatened or actual natural disasters, acts of terrorism, or other man-made disasters.

Emergency response in Waldo County is a multi-phase process and they work hard to ensure that they have resources that are always ready to respond. During emergencies, they need access to all the information available in order to respond effectively and after an incident, they will write reports to evaluate their effectiveness. To support their mission, Waldo County EMA had been searching for an information management system that could assist them during all phases of an emergency.

The Solution

The D4H’s readiness and response software suite was selected to be the information management system for the county EMA to cover the whole emergency response life cycle during three main phases:

Readiness

Waldo County is aware that the outcome of an incident, crisis, or emergency is determined by the capability of those who respond. Ensuring their staff are regularly trained and experienced with scheduled drills, is critical to incident outcomes. D4H Personnel & Training is the County EMA’s system for tracking the training, participation, and qualifications of all personnel. The system is used to ensure that personnel tasked with assignments are always ready to go.

Centralizing all the county’s available equipment ensures operational oversight when it comes to equipment readiness. D4H Equipment Management helps with organizing equipment repairs, expiry dates, service history, weights, values, calibrations, and inspections.

Response

D4H Incident Management is the County EOC’s common operating picture data management tool. The County Emergency Operations Center (EOC) staff, municipal EM directors, local hospital, and County Regional Communications Center (RCC) all have access to this system to input, track and display disaster information.

When so much is at risk, it’s critical to maintain a single source of truth. Resources located and requested at the County level are ordered by the Resource or Supply Manager are tracked in D4H Incident Management.

During any level of activation of the County EOC, the EOC Staff will utilize WebEOC and e-mail to transfer large amounts of data to and from the State EOC and other counties EOCs. The County EMA’s online portal D4H Incident Management is used to easily create this local data with on-the-fly reporting.

Re-Evaluation

Once an event has ended, it’s a safe bet that the final protracted stages could involve litigation. Using D4H Incident Reporting allows Waldo to prepare for this by automatically collecting a complete audit trail of every action, decision, and piece of information.

Every functional or field exercise is critiqued afterward by the key personnel involved. D4H is used to develop an after-action report and manage an ongoing corrective actions program. The evolution of our technology has allowed Waldo to capture, store, and analyze incident response data in a structured way. It’s just like having their own in-house statistician with single-click daily, monthly, and annual reporting, charts, and maps.