How Borger OEM Uses D4H to Manage Wildfire Responses

Customer Background

The Borger Office of Emergency Management (OEM) is responsible for public notifications in an emergency and coordination with incident commanders during large scale events. Their primary focus is on prevention, mitigation, response, and recovery to emergencies and disasters. Emergency Management personnel from the City of Borger and Hutchinson County operate the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) located centrally in Borger. The EOC is a fully equipped station with multiple radar feeds, communications consoles, and area camera systems for monitoring weather conditions.

Their staff includes a dedicated emergency manager, the Borger Fire Marshals Office, and Hutchinson County’s Emergency Management. Emergency Managers are State Certified Police Officers and Arson Investigators. Additional certifications and training include extensive work in wildland fire mitigation and response.

The Challenge

During emergency situations, weather events, and natural disasters, the EOC is responsible for tracking all information as it comes in and coordinating an effective response. One of their major challenges was the fact that information and communications would be spread across multiple locations, systems, and platforms during an incident. Borger OEM needed one central location to track their entire response.

Situations can rapidly change during an active incident. This is particularly true for the City of Borger/ Hutchinson County, where fire is one of their biggest threats. It was important that Borger OEM implemented a software solution that would allow users to input data from the field and provide real-time situational awareness.

The Solution

Borger OEM deployed D4H Incident Management as their EOC emergency management solution. D4H Incident Management is a real-time software platform that enables the coordination of an effective response to any situation. Borger OEM can create a common operating picture in their EOC, communicate objectives, and collaborate on a resolution using forms, tasks, logs, maps, and status boards using the software.

“Using D4H’s map layers, we plot evacuation thresholds based on the fire’s potential rate of spread. If a fire gets to one of the areas we’ve marked on the map, that’s a trigger point to evacuate. During more severe fire days, the areas on the map would be larger.”
—Jason Whisler, Emergency Management Coordinator, Borger Office of Emergency Management

With the help of D4H, Borger OEM has all the available information at hand to make important decisions during an incident. The cloud-based software is accessible from any location, on any device, enabling all EOC staff and partner agencies to be on the same page during an incident regardless of their location.