How to Run Your EOC Remotely During a Hurricane

As hurricanes make landfall, many Emergency Operations Centers across the US and Canada are still operating remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While this comes with new challenges, there are solutions specifically designed to help your organization overcome these challenges and ensure a well-coordinated response, without the need for EOC staff to be gathered in a single physical location.

D4H Incident Management

We’ve designed a real-time incident management platform to enable you to create one centralized location for your response, which is remotely accessible on any device, from any location. This powerful technology enables you to ensure the health and safety of your staff without compromising your ability to communicate and collaborate.

Our incident management software solution enables the coordination of an effective response to hurricanes and other complex emergencies. As we’ve seen with Hurricane Isaias, situations can rapidly change during an emergency. It’s important that your response organization can be flexible enough to respond accordingly, our incident management platform has been designed with exactly this in mind. With coordination and communication being key, you can easily create a common operating picture, communicate objectives, and collaborate on a resolution using forms, tasks, logs, maps, and status boards.

How D4H Incident Management Played a Key Role in Hurricane Dorian Response

For Horry County Fire Rescue, a major part of their disaster response to Hurricane Dorian last year was a well-managed Incident Action Plan. Digitizing these forms with D4H Incident Management enabled the team to collaboratively fill them out while in the field, in real-time. The information was then automatically synced and shared into the Common Operating Picture for all senior responders to see. All this information can then be digitally stored in the cloud, where it can be accessed anywhere, on any device, resulting in less time spent, reporting, transcribing, collecting and collating information during and after the incident.

“D4H has provided us with easier communication when managing large-scale incidents as well as simplified documentation. It also provides the ability to process and display the information that key players need to make decisions.”
— Captain Michael Henry, Medical Officer/ EMS Captain, Horry County Fire Rescue.

How Knoxville-Knox County EMA is Operating Their EOC Remotely During COVID-19

With the outbreak of COVID-19, Knoxville-Knox County Emergency Management Agency needed to create a virtual EOC environment to ensure the safety of their staff and partner agencies. D4H Incident Management provides an overall single source of truth for their COVID-19 response. They have been using status boards to track all COVID-19 cases in their county as well as the state of Tennessee. They keep an update log to track all new information as it comes in and they use the software to track which county facilities are open, closed or operating on limited service. KEMA also uses the incident management platform to track resource requests for PPE and other logistical items by the police and other departments within the county. The cloud-based software enables staff to access this information from anywhere, on any device, allowing them to maintain safe social distancing while carrying out their duties.