Stop Chasing Information. Make It Come to You.

How to automate information collection for situation reports and get your time back

Hey EM Tech Family! 👋

I used to be that Situation Unit Leader making 20 phone calls for a single situation report.

It's hour 60 of a Hurricane activation. Leadership wants a situation report in 2 hours. I need evacuation center occupancy from multiple shelters, resource deployment status from multiple sections, closure statuses, response actions, weather briefings, damaged infrastructure and more.

So I start calling. I start emailing. I’m running around the operation center communicating with liaisons. I’m getting tasked with 50 other to dos. The evacuation center manager is "in a meeting." By the time I get responses, half the information is already outdated.

Sound familiar?

Turns out this nightmare is universal. Research shows it takes most emergency management agencies 12-24 hours to produce their first situation report after an incident begins. During Hurricane Ian, FEMA published 21 situation reports over 13 days. The 2013 Rim Fire? 100 situation reports over 68 days.

FEMA completed after-action reviews for only 29% of disasters from 2017-2019, partly because their information collection systems couldn't keep up with incident demands.

But here's what nobody talks about: This isn't inevitable.

I figured out how to cut situation report creation from 8+ hours to ~ 90 minutes. Not by buying expensive software, but by flipping one simple assumption about who should do the work of information collection.