When disaster strikes, a city’s emergency and crisis management team is first in line to coordinate the response. No matter whether it’s a natural, man-made, or purely accidental disaster, there are innumerable pieces of the emergency response puzzle that need to be placed together perfectly in order to reduce casualties and keep the public safe. This means rapid communication, articulated plans of action, and clear chains of authority across the full range of emergency services. Events like the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, the 2021 Florida Surfside Condominium Collapse, and the 2022 Eastern Australia floods have proven that breakdowns in communication can lead to truly devastating results. So how does this kind of coordination work? And what does it look like when things go right – or wrong?
Understanding City-Level Crisis Management
City-level crisis management involves three key pieces: preparation, response, and recovery. Here’s what each piece looks like:
Preparation involves the development of response plans to the full spectrum of disasters that may occur in a given jurisdiction. Once those plans are developed, continued training, testing, and adjustments are required to ensure that once a live response is required, all parties know their roles and responsibilities. These response plans are typically developed by city officials in cooperation with their local disaster, fire, health, police, and rescue teams, and organisational bodies to ensure swift action when emergency strikes.
Response is the in-the-moment coordination of all emergency services in response to an event. In the past, this was done in silos with manual processes to create cross-agency collaboration and communication, resulting in manual processing involving phone calls, emails and text messages being relayed through chains of command. As you might imagine, when a situation is evolving by the second, these systems can be far too slow. While most cities have training and command structures in place that work to avoid mistakes, this degree of communication speed has long been a hindering (and potentially deadly) factor. Luckily, modern technology has begun to catch up, with platforms like Chronicler now allowing for advanced information distribution strategies and communication speeds that match the pace of evolving situations.
Recovery is the follow-up. On the news, it looks like cleaning up rubble or unclogging storm drains – but it can also involve strategies for feeding and housing victims, providing mental health resources to both victims and response workers, and managing insurance processes for the city. Proper recovery plans are key to ensuring that any long-term effects of the disaster are cared for effectively, and don’t result in potentially huge run-on costs down the line.
Challenges Faced During City-Level Crises
One of the core problems faced by traditional crisis management team structures is communication. How do you ensure that paramedics, fire & rescue, infrastructure, and law enforcement all have to-the-minute updates on the situation? Traditional control room strategies rely on larger teams with defined decision-making authorities and clear chains of command down to each department, but as cases like the Grenfell Tower fire show, mismatched levels of information between teams do happen and can lead to severe consequences. Repairing communication fractures takes too much time and only furthers the problems for other departments.
The other core problem is resource management. Logistical challenges like arranging food, shelter, and mental health support for all parties affected by the event can push city resources to their limits, and often require outside assistance from generous community groups or charities. Rebuilding and cleanup efforts can also place heavy demands on city resources and require close coordination with private companies, further delaying recovery efforts.
The Role of Technology in Crisis Management
Modern technology is granting decision-makers greater control over crisis events by enhancing all the communication strategies that have seen proven success in previous decades. Incident management platforms are a relatively new technology that allow crisis managers to do everything that they know works – communicate, delegate, and record – at speeds that don’t get in the way of response teams taking action.
Chronosoft’s Chronicler, for example, allows key information to be shared instantaneously on a per-agency basis – that is, the fire teams may need to know how many people are in the incident space, paramedics need to know current casualties, and traffic response teams need to know the state of the roads around the event. Chronicler can ensure that those pieces of information are only transmitted to the teams that need them, without compromising on communication speed. Further tech, such as area-based SMS alerts, dynamic mapping and pathfinding, and post-event analytics all allow for response plans that are precisely tailored to the crisis in progress.
Lessons Learned and Best Practices
The adoption of crisis management technologies is allowing cities around the world to better respond to events as they happen – but there are some key practices that have existed for decades that have become the gold standard for crisis management. Centralising command and control, enhancing real-time communication speeds, and involving community organisations early are some of the key strategies that command centres utilise in order to respond swiftly and decisively. Additionally, regular cross-agency training, efficient resource management planning, and Gold-Silver-Bronze command chains are essential for preparedness and adaptability during crises. Post-crisis support, including mental health care, is also beginning to be integrated into response plans from the outset, ensuring that survivors receive the necessary long-term assistance.
In the modern day, incident management and command centre platforms like Chronicler are allowing agencies to coordinate efficiently, sharing vital information in real time with all necessary parties while maintaining clear roles through structured command frameworks. These platforms can also integrate NGOs and community groups to provide immediate support, such as food and shelter, ensuring a faster, more coordinated response. With technologies like this on the side of disaster and emergency management teams, we hope to see ever-greater improvements in the kinds of coordinated responses to crisis events that lead to lives being saved and communities staying safe.
If you’d like to learn more about Chronicler and how your organisation could adopt it in planning your crisis response strategies, please visit https://www.chronosoft.com.au/ today.
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