D4H Incident Management Plays Key Role in Hurricane Dorian Response

Customer Background

Horry County Fire Rescue is a high volume Fire-Rescue and EMS agency. They have a coverage area exceeding 1,100 square miles, serve a population of over 300,000 and respond to approximately 60,000 calls each year. Horry County is the jurisdiction surrounding the City of Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, a large tourist destination with millions of visitors each year. Horry County hosts multiple special events every year and like many areas of the Southeastern United States, they are no stranger to severe weather events such as hurricanes and tornados.

Horry County Fire Rescue is a combination department with over 600 responders between career and volunteer personnel responding from 39 stations. They have the responsibility to respond to all fires, medical aid calls, vehicle accidents, HAZMAT and emergency call types throughout the unincorporated areas of the county.

The Challenge

“Prior to implementing D4H, we were utilizing a combination of MS Word and PDF documents to publish Incident Action Plans. Our resource status tracking system consisted of a large whiteboard with tags displaying unit identifiers.”
— Captain Michael Henry, Medical Officer/ EMS Captain, Horry County Fire Rescue.

Completing, sharing and storing the various forms required in an Incident Action Plan can be a struggle. To complete their Incident Command System forms, Horry County Fire Rescue would edit multiple formatted PDFs and Word documents, this process could be time- consuming and tedious.

The Solution

Horry County Fire Rescue discovered D4H while working with an incident management team in response to Hurricane Florence and the post-hurricane flooding event. After seeing the demonstrated value of D4H during their response to Hurricane Florence, the decision was made to move forward with acquiring and implementing D4H themselves.

“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.

A major part of a coordinated disaster response to an event such as Hurricane Florence or Hurricane Dorian is a well-managed Incident Action Plan. Digitizing these forms with D4H Incident Management enables teams to collaboratively fill them out while in the field, in real-time. The information is automatically synced and shared into the Common Operating Picture for all senior responders to see. All this information is 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.

“As we see D4H constantly developing and new features being added I feel that this system can help manage incidents of all sizes and complexities for organizations large and small. The user-friendly administrative interface allows for development at the organizational level with little computer knowledge or ability.”
—Captain Michael Henry, Medical Officer/ EMS Captain, Horry County Fire Rescue.

Example

“As we come to the end of our first year with D4H I can proudly say that we have utilized the system to plan, document and manage two large scale events. We have utilized it to schedule, track and deploy all EMS resources during the Memorial Day Bike Week event in Horry County as well as the Fire-Rescue-EMS response to Hurricane Dorian.”
— Captain Michael Henry, Medical Officer/ EMS Captain, Horry County Fire Rescue.