Real-Time Situational Awareness

As an incident is unfolding, emergency management staff need immediately accessible, actionable information in order to make the best decisions at the right time. Understanding how an incident is evolving in the context of where operations are happening is crucial for first responders, who need to know where and when to allocate and accurately deploy resources. Emergency management organizations require real-time situational awareness to enable staff to:

• effectively monitor changing conditions 
• make location intelligence-powered mission-critical decisions 
• and anticipate problems before they can occur 

The ability to see things happening in real-time as well as the ability to anticipate where resources will be needed are a critical advantage during a disaster.

Explore the real-time situation Cal Prep dashboard, utilized to respond during the massive wildfires that burned through much of California in 2018.

Disasters are fundamentally chaotic on many levels as people are uprooted from their homes and resources are deployed from various partners, all at the same time. Despite efforts to expedite communications and collaborate on response efforts, the critical disaster information provided takes an extensive amount of time to collect and comes from a variety of disconnected systems and processes. These manual and paper-based processes offer intermittent updates at best and, as a result, the data received is never a current reflection of the disaster or easily analyzed for critical decisions to be made.

Maintaining situational awareness during the event is key to effective response efforts. Responders need to know where evacuations should be coordinated, where shelters and hospitals are located, what the current traffic conditions are, and where operations are being conducted across the incident.

Situational awareness with real-time data feeds enables better coordination, providing a clear, accurate, and up-to-the-minute picture of any incident, including where critical infrastructure and people are located. These fully integrated data feeds and sensors allow you to monitor an incident through key metrics that provide guidance and allow you to focus your attention on where resources are needed the most.

Esri’s real-time solutions support all types and scales of incidents. The shared situational awareness Esri provides means that all involved parties are kept up to date in real-time, with the added assurance that everyone- from emergency management personnel to the public in need of answers- has the same data on what’s happening now, and where.