Miami-Dade Emergency Services
Miami, Florida
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When a natural
disaster or terrorist threat strikes South Florida, the Office of Emergency
Management (OEM) for Miami-Dade County springs into action. The OEM
coordinates all aspects of disaster management for Miami-Dade County
including the organization of fire, public safety and medical services,
road traffic situations and updates on shelters for displaced residents.
To ensure that critical information is rapidly updated, OEM needed a
software system that could display immediate changes. For this, OEM
turned to Scala, Inc., and Scala's InfoChannel 200 software to continuously
update information without service interruptions.
Scala's software is used to display live information on five plasma
screens set up for specific sections of OEM's Emergency Operations Center
(EOC), each concentrating on a different elements of the disaster. The
EOC contains 72 seats occupied by representatives of each agency or
function to ensure that the community's needs are met. In times of peak
emergency, between two and three hundred people crowd into the EOC including
government officials and the media.
"We gather all the information to get a true picture of the disaster,
assess the needs of the community, and then distribute scarce resources,"
said Bill Johnson, OEM's Assistant Director. "Scala's software allows
us to respond to information as soon as it is available--something that
becomes incredibly important in times of disaster."
The software
is used to update the five information service screens that include
Miami-Dade County's areas of human services, public safety, infrastructure
and operations. Since response time is critical for the OEM, four operators
collect and update details via keyboards and the data is simultaneously
updated and displayed on the screens.
Key areas include the capacity of all of the area shelters, public safety
board listings of the location and hours of curfews, possible automobile
traffic issues, road and bridge closings, as well as, power and communication
interruptions. The large operations screen provides the "overall snapshot"
of what has already been done and future plans. "It is essential for
the people at these tables to know what the others are doing. So we
have five status boards that are continually updated," Johnson said.
"Prior to our use of Scala, we relied on flip charts and dry erase markers,
pieces of paper and projection monitors. Having someone brush by a board
and accidentally wipe off our disaster plans has been known to happen."
"Scala allows for a better, quicker snapshot of the status of an incident,"
added Johnson. "It has markedly improved our ability to gather and disseminate
information and respond effectively as information changes."
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