 I am so excited to have Ashley Morris with us tonight. Ashley is an emergency management planner for the Baltimore County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management in Maryland, and her primary role with Baltimore County is emergency plan management, exercise coordination, social media messaging, community outreach, and volunteer management. Ashley has a degree from Texas Tech and she has been involved in emergency operation center roles such as situational awareness, weather briefings, and many other planning section duties. So without further ado, I give you to Ashley, the expert. All right, so I'm so glad to be here. Like she said, my name is Ashley Morris. I'm currently doing emergency management out in Maryland. I actually started my emergency management career in Texas at Williamson County just north of Austin. I was with the county for about a year and a half before I went to the city of Leander and I was helping them build their emergency management program from scratch as they stepped away from the county to take on their own disaster responsibilities. During my time in Texas, my first EOC activation was actually Hurricane Harvey, although we got very lucky in the Austin area with the flooding there. That was a big activation for me. We also had wildfires up in Williamson County, severe weather. I saw that you guys all had a bunch of tornadoes last week, which I didn't have to actually deal with that as directly as you have, but my heart was with my community. I was very worried about everybody and I'm glad to see that my partners in Williamson County are working very hard with Round Rock and doing tornado recovery and things like that. And after spending three years there, I headed out to Maryland with hopes of doing some more deployment, trying to also get into some FEMA training up here in Maryland and in the DC area. And so while I'm out here in the East freezing, I do very much miss my Texas roots and the areas where I really got my first step in emergency management. So happy to be here. The goal of this presentation is really to take a look at how we've been using technology to do emergency management and disaster management. As everybody knows, technology is rapidly increasing, improving and developing. And so it's really key for us and our success as emergency managers and trying to take on the chaos of what disaster management is to try to wrangle that and use technology to really drive our actions to try to get a better outcome. So tonight, since I have everybody in this room, I do see some people are from public safety and so they're probably a little familiar with whatever emergency management and disaster management is. But I also know there are probably others who are here on the technology side of things and maybe you're not so familiar of what emergency management is. And so every time I do a talk on my field or my career, I love to give an overview of what that is. Usually when people ask me, what do you do? And I say emergency management, they're like, oh, what's that? And then I explain it and they ask me if I'm on a fire truck and I have to say no. So this is going to be a great opportunity to do a little bit of outreach about emergency management and how everybody has a local emergency manager working very hard to keep you safe, keep you prepared, and then also spring into action when you have a local disaster in your neck of the woods. After we go over emergency management, we're going to roll into the emergency management cycle. So I'm going to talk about technology in preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation and how we've been plugging those in as we go along. And then we're actually going to jump into focus areas and focus topics of emergency management covering things like alert systems, warning systems, public information. How do we get information about our disaster response to survivors and people who are trying to serve and get back on their feet? Very important to have very solid public information. Mapping. So how are we looking at hazards? How are we looking at how our threats are changing with the evolving environments that we have, climate change, other things? How are we using mapping to really leverage our emergency preparedness and response? Situational awareness. So as we are in our emergency operation center and we're responding to an incoming hurricane or wildfire, how are we using technology to collect that information to make sure that we have the best information confirmed so we can make solid decisions to once again save lives and protect property? And then lastly, looking at community preparedness. So how are we using technology to leverage how we're teaching our communities to be prepared and respond? And how can we use technology to be better at that down the road, especially as we see things like all the different technology that's evolving, social media, VR, all those really cool things that we might be able to use to teach our community about the risks? And then after that we'll take a formal Q&A for anybody who has any questions and we will move on from there. So starting with what is emergency management? So when I get asked that question I get asked what I do, I like to actually tell people I'm a disaster manager because saying disaster kind of paints the picture easier for them to understand it's less of being a first responder, it's more doing the disaster side of things. I also like to chuckle and say master of disaster because number one it rhymes, but number two we like to think that we're in the middle of chaos trying to get it all together. And then three I like to say we are the circus rain leader of disaster and the reason being is that as an emergency manager we're trying to take all the different agencies, all the different first responders, all the different levels of government, local, state and the federal during federally declared disasters and then we're also trying to take all those resources, donations, things and organize that into one solid response. So we're very much trying to juggle all of these things, conduct, trying to get everything in a row so our response is as effective as possible and also as conservative as possible in terms of spending and resource management. So that's what we do now as an emergency manager we do have jobs outside of just responding to disaster and so that's where this emergency management cycle actually comes into play. We do disaster preparedness, response, recovery and then mitigation. So before the disaster we spent a lot of time doing preparedness and that's simple as doing these things going out in the community teaching people about what emergency management is, what we spend our time doing, how can people be more ready for the next disaster or whatever that might be and then also spending a ton of time writing emergency plans working with our local governments to have county response plans. Working very closely with our first response partners to make sure that they have the resources that they need to do things like search and rescue, going in and rescuing people, triage, medical as what's very hard hitting we have disasters on first response needs and their response. So we're always working with them making sure we have the things we need, the plans and then after we have those plans we actually spend a lot of time doing scenarios. So we'll actually do a disaster exercise where we test the plan, we put the plan in motion, we come up with a fake disaster scenario and we try to see how well the plan will actually work. The reason we do that is because a tested plan is always a better plan and we never want to actually test our plan in the middle of a disaster if we don't have to because if we find out that there's holes in the plan we would much rather be a drill than the real thing. So that's a overview of preparedness. For response that's what happens when we have the disaster so the hurricane hits, the fire starts, the terror attack happens. We are springing into action, oftentimes activating an emergency operation center which is actually a center room space where we bring all of our partners, all the people who are involved in the response into one ring so we can collaborate, communicate, share resources and be organized because if we didn't have that EOC it would be very chaotic. We would have different agencies doing different things. No one would be able to communicate and then just with the hecticness of what disaster response is that EOC is really pivotal to that. Outside of being in the EOC obviously we're making decisions about evacuations, providing shelter, providing food and water, also getting people to safety so search and rescue like I mentioned before, all sorts of things that you usually see on the news in the middle of the disaster. After the disaster is over we're usually working hard to do rebuilding so we're opening up recovery centers so we can bring people in and get them on the right foot to recover. We're looking at different kind of aid packages depending on how the level of disaster is, what kind of aid and financial support they might have and then we're also working to do things like establish codes and build back better which is a little bit on the mitigation side that I'm going to talk about, but trying to rebuild our community to be whole again but better so we don't suffer as much when we have that disaster again which is exactly the definition of what disaster mitigation is and we spend a lot of time writing mitigation plans, getting mitigation funds and then doing projects like flood plain management or like I said making codes, making sure people don't build houses in areas that flood or in areas that we have wildfires. So as an emergency manager we are very busy. We have a lot of stuff that we're constantly trying to get done and technology can only help leverage a lot of this stuff with data analysis and other tactics that we can use. So looking at the technology in each section we have starting with preparedness and we're going to go into depth with a lot of these things later on in the presentation but preparedness is all about planning like I mentioned so when we do planning we have to first know what our risk is. Are we historically known to be a flooding area? Do we have a lot of wildfire or wildland urban interface for wildfires which Austin is they call it wooey. Austin's very high risk for wildfire and flooding so that would be a risk. So as an emergency manager we use risk assessment and models and maps all the time to try to figure out in our area what is most at risk. So after we do that emergency planning we use those same models and plug those into the plans. Digital mapping GIS which is going to be a big thing that we're going to cover tonight which has been a hugely helpful thing in disaster response and just continues to grow as companies like Esri and other people that are developing GIS start to grow their product more and really expand towards disaster management. We're actually seeing full-time GIS positions pop open in emergency management offices because we're doing so much planning with hazards mapping it mapping where our vulnerable populations are trying to map where our shelters are so emergency planning and GIS maps is a massive thing in emergency management right now. Inventory systems so actually keeping track of all those goods that I said that we need food and water and all those search and rescue supplies, cots of all of those things we keep inventory on that and luckily the old systems that we used to use pen and paper or even excel are starting to get very outdated because we have inventory systems that we can use now where we could plug and play that stuff. FEMA is actually working on some shared systems and we can actually put things in and put them in by resource type and kind and category which is very useful especially for disaster reimbursement which is important for me as an emergency manager because I'm trying to get that federal funding back to my jurisdiction so we can recover and sustain better. Talking about disaster exercise and drills so once again modeling having those models and maps that help show us the worst case scenario in our jurisdiction really help us plan a good exercise and then test what the response really should be and that's actually becoming more and more important because previously we were able to really think about how disasters used to affect our areas but now we're seeing a lot more catastrophic disasters that have never happened in history before so as an emergency manager I no longer can look back 50 years and go and say we had a flood that did this because now due to changes climate change other things we've never seen that before so we could see a flood that's triple times what we thought so that's where the modeling and the tech really helps come in to to show us what that picture would be instead of trying to use history or use our imaginations for that. Weather forecasting so I actually went to school to study meteorology and I was going to do national weather service forecasting before I went into emergency management but Bell in love with doing this but weather forecasting is greatly evolving the complexity of our weather models now and the success rates that they're having in terms of forecast air with tropical storm location and landfall and all of that is tremendous even if you compare it to the 2000s so that's really great to see especially as someone who's trying to prepare for what that weather related disaster is going to do to my community and then lastly home systems so something that we're seeing a lot and we're going to talk a lot about this for preparedness later is the development of home smart technology which is really popping open in a lot of housing markets and it's adding different layers like I believe some of them have weather on them now so you can actually see the weather on your smart home some of them are actually putting weather warnings if you've had a tornado warning in round rock it your house would actually tell you hey there's a tornado warning for your house and then some of the other systems are actually getting smaller enough to where they can tell you the status of your slope detectors if you need changed battery all sorts of things so that's a really cool area that I think that maybe we could leverage with technology for emergency and disaster preparedness response so we touched a lot about response already but we have things like our alert systems which if you've ever gotten an amber alert or tornado warning on your cell phone with the really loud tone and the vibrations that's known as the ipod system so that's one system of many that we have to deliver life safety or life safety information to the public we also have flood sensors and this is a big one for the Austin area because many jurisdictions especially down like in wimberley haze county in those areas that have had significant flooding actually have flood sensors on roads so when your road starts to get water covered the little handbars will come down and close the road to prevent people from driving through it a very big deal because we do lose a lot of people to flood related fatalities from driving into water so we're using technology to try to close the roads faster to prevent the fatalities that are coming from that earthquake sensors so that's another one scientists are still trying to work very hard on earthquake prediction and it turns out to be a lot bigger of a challenge than hurricane prediction or even weather predictions but out in california and in other places they're actually developing sensors that are hypersensitive and start to actually feel some of those tremors and some of those seismic waves before or right before the earthquake hits and it's actually starting to give a little bit of a heads up that people never had before which once again is only beneficial to the first responders who are going to have to go out there and take care of the the search and rescue saving people from collapsed buildings fires gas lines things like that so that's really great to see too we have web eoc or eoc technology which helps us share the status of our response what resources have i ordered what resources have i got what information can we share between each other that's really great technology and we actually use it a lot up here and i know texas uses it as well to share between local jurisdictions and the state of texas or tido and then we have more eoc tech so that's going to be our screens our tv's our av systems things like that really help us see the full picture of what's going on outside the emergency operation center and then lastly we have my favorite which is social media and crowd sourcing which really give us a huge input into what people are doing what people need it really adds to that overview that we have of the disaster that's ongoing and then lastly is damage assessment where esri has actually developed a gis tool that we can actually go out and send our damage assessment teams on an app and they can take a picture of the flooded house make notes and in real time we can actually track their assessment out in the field in the eoc and it populates on a map and it actually counts up all of our damage and does all of that which is just phenomenal because before that we had to do everything by hand on paper and things like that then moving into recovery so we have crowd sourcing on there as well because once again we do the best recovery when we're collecting that information from people and with technology social media and then developing apps and things like that we have learned to really leverage that put out an app like the texas department of emergency management did during the winter storm that happened last year they put out a survey or an app where people could go in and report their damage and all that information came back to this state and they were able to estimate you know how much money was lost how significant the damage was in different regions of texas and it really helped steer a lot of the funding and a lot of the recovery we have drones are phenomenal and we were actually able to use a drone during one of the ef1 tornadoes that we had in leander to do damage assessment and it was really neat because while we had areas where we could easily assess and take pictures and start that gis map on where the tornado went when we put the drone up we saw damage that we would have never seen people have a lot of pilot land and other things that you can't necessarily get back to and that drone gave us the ability to fly right over the path and get the full picture and the full extent of what that storm actually did as opposed to only what we could see and then we also have cloud storage so that seems simple in terms of technology but I think that really has made our lives significantly easier with disaster management we have a ton of documentation forms and paperwork and different things that we have to keep track of not only for federal reimbursement with FEMA but also just to track our own response and for our end records and having an ability to have drives and storage and have an organization of that process really saves us a lot of time and it also helps us get a lot more money back from FEMA for that reimbursement and if we just had a paper trail and had to do that all by hand and then once again I have social media on recovery because you can really leverage that to get pictures from people know what people need get recovery information and loan and FEMA support information out to people and then lastly modeling so using modeling to help us steer where we're going to rebuild back first what are the priorities what could we be missing there and then lastly mitigation so it's a combination of recovery and preparedness a little bit but we do hazard modeling once again trying to figure out if I have a giant flood and I'm going to lose these neighborhoods what can I do to save these neighborhoods do I need to buy these houses out and pay a significant amount of money to buy these homes and then turn it into wetland and then not allow anyone to live there anymore or perhaps do I need to remodel my buildings and add hurricane straps to make sure that when the hurricane comes in the wind doesn't blow my roof off those kinds of things and we do use modeling to help us make those decisions on where we need to do those projects what are priorities etc and then lastly we do have digital simulations once again to show us exactly how our mitigation can actually benefit or have one of those cost benefit analysis to stand up for our requests and also validate what we're doing with those funds we do get a significant amount of hazard mitigation funding available that you can apply for from the feds but obviously we want to make sure that we do those digital simulations to show exactly why our project's important why we're doing this one because it helps argue that and helps us win that funding I was on that slide for a while and I do remember how to turn it all right so now that we gave an overview of the emergency management tech and the emergency management cycle we're going to go into those isolated areas and really focus down into each one so starting with alert and warning systems this is a huge passion of mine because if people don't receive the tornado warning or the nuclear power plant warning or whatever warning we're trying to put out to the public they're not going to know about it and then they're not going to be able to take shelter and then they're not going to be able to be safe and so alert and warning is so important and that's why we're leveraging systems like iPods which is that federal system that you see over here on the left where we can send wireless emergency alerts EAS which is right here to the TV and we can use that to ping the most people we also have things like the NOAA weather radio where people can purchase these and they can get tornado warnings flash flood warnings and they can go and take shelter all of these systems have been known to save lives especially for those who have multiple systems and we do like to teach an emergency management that everybody should have at least three of the systems because while technology is really great and it's really advanced there have been several occasions where technology doesn't always work so it's important to have backup systems in case one of those messages doesn't work like it should and so we're using these systems constantly usually first of your weather getting weather warnings out from the National Weather Service also using it for evacuations if we were to send out information to get people off the coastline or something like that we can use this we had an active assailant active shooter situation to get people out of danger we can also use it for things like terrorism hazmat spills especially if there's a toxic cloud of gas that spilled out and we want people to stay indoors and turn off their ACs we don't want them to be exposed to that and then we can also use it for utility interruption which has been honestly what i've used it the most for things like boil water notices or austin has had several of those over the past few years where they had citywide boil water notices so they would want to get that out to the public and send a notice so people would know that their water isn't necessarily safe or it's being tested right and lastly missing child in person we can also utilize some of the systems for that and ipos already does by broadcasting the amber alerts for that so if we think about alert and warning then now and later because that's the theme that we're going with tonight way back then before he had a ton of technology believe it or not populations and little communities would use things like smoke signals and bonfires to alert that something was wrong often that was during times war letting someone know that a neighboring army was coming or any kind of emergency they would do that that actually shifted into church bells especially in the middle ages during disasters i actually was reading a really great book it's called the big one and she was talking about some of the volcanic eruptions from back then as well as earthquakes where the churches actually did ring their bells to let them know that there's an earthquake ongoing or a wildfire or an eruption and people were alerted they heard the church ringing and they went outside and looked around and realized that danger was happening so it was very successful back then for that that actually evolved also into air raid sirens that were typically developed for world war one world war two and then the cold war era where we had all of that to alert us of any kind of attack which then the air raids actually moved into tornado warning sirens and other sirens that we still use to this day but sticking to back then we also had things like word of mouth or even via forceback as well as just going door to door which believe it or not we still do use that so a lot of those are super high tech but it's very interesting to take a look at what they did before we had tech nowadays we've evolved quite a bit we have reverse 911 systems where we can use those opt-in alert and warning systems like born central texas that you can log in you make an account you put your landline number you also put yourself a number in your address and then when we have an issue evacuation we draw on the map the area that has the emergency and send you a message that way we also have iPause which i've already talked a lot about and it's going to be our focus point to the next slide with the emergency alerts lastly elect electronic sirens so like i said the tornado siren concept or some people use that for floods a lot of dams usually have sirens in case they had a day of failure things like that and then we do actually have panic buttons nowadays especially in areas like courthouses where if there is going to be an active shooter or an attack someone can just hit a button and it actually triggers 911 that there's an emergency and then we still have door to door as our backup even though that's not tech if tech fails we can still go to that and then also we use the to cover for people who don't always have access for technology because that's really important too and then looking at the future or looking at where our alert and warning is going we have several different things that are currently being developed so as i mentioned we have eas which used to interrupt your tv time with that really loud noise and scrolling on the bottom and the message that you get on your tv the issue with that is that not a lot of people have cable anymore and not a lot of people watch that because people are on netflix or hulu or hbo or whatever it is and so the streaming platforms are actually currently working right now with ipos to figure out a way to where we can actually put those alerts on streaming devices because right now they're in the blind and that's going to be really cool to see the same goes for radio so usually with eas and with old school systems it would interrupt the radio and it would tell you the emergency over the radio now not a lot of people listen to the radio because maybe they have serious a lot of people do the whole spotify thing and so they're working to actually get those alerts through that as well to really cover the development and changes that we've had as a society in how we consume entertainment sources i also mentioned the home detection systems so actually figuring out a way to use those smart home systems to develop the alerts would be a really cool thing we really struggle in emergency management to get people to take the time to sign up for opt-in systems register put that stuff in and unfortunately when we only have 10 in the population on there when we have a disaster we only reach 10 unless we use all those other ways so being able to actually leverage home detection systems or home smart systems would be amazing because we could actually make more of our residents aware when they're in a dangerous situation or emergency we also have things like cars and warnings so some of the newer smart bars are actually WIA compliant so when we put out the WIA the wireless emergency alert via the ipod system it'll pop up on the car screen that there's a tornado warning that's super cool because unfortunately we've had a lot of fatalities like the one that happened it was a night storm up in Dallas where it hit a turnpike and people didn't know we've had a lot of fatalities related to people driving into storms not knowing there's a tornado warning things like that so that would be really helpful for us on the safety aspect google maps so once again we've had some significant challenges with google maps and actually getting people to not drive into the middle of evacuation zones during wildfires and other emergencies so google maps is working on figuring out how to close certain roads how to display some of that disaster information in real time and then also it has been pushed around about the concept of putting weather warnings on google maps as well because once again people who are traveling if they're driving through the middle of the tornado valley they might not know what that looks like they may not be familiar with tornado stuff but if that popped up on their map they would know and be alerted and then lastly smart watches so if any of you are familiar with the commercials that the apple watch had been doing they're actually trying to make a 911 sensor in their watch that senses when you fall down or when you're hurt or in trouble and then automatically call 911 for you similar to some of the car systems that we have that's very interesting and it makes us wonder too if we could use smart watches to perhaps push some of those alerts to people via watch just so once again they know because not everybody has their cell phone now when we are sending those cell phone alerts or those weather watch and warnings so just to focus in on iPods this is the modern day alert system that we have here and it's all based on cell tower so the really cool thing about this system is people do not have to sign up to get these alerts they just have to have a cell phone that is iPods and we are compliant and up to date and they have to have the emergency alerts turned on in their phone settings if they have those things and they're within one of these cell phone tower radiuses they will get the notice whether or not it's a weather morning evacuation whenever it is that we're sending they will get it in this polygon area it's been known to be super super effective especially in areas of wildfire and things like that and like i said because there's less action we can reach more people with that the only disadvantage to this is that because it's based on cell tower if i send an alert and it crosses this tower right here but i'm standing over here i'm still going to get the alert because the alert disseminates to each tower and it doesn't understand what the lines are so when it hits this tower it's going to hit any phone in this radius and unfortunately even during weather we have situations where people are getting tornado warnings and they're not technically in the box but that's just some of the cell and technology limitations that we have that we just don't have any control over all right public information so once again this is extremely important in disaster response and recovery because the perception of your response as well as getting things to people relies heavily on people getting that information and knowing so i can't just open up a shelter and expect everyone to know where it is i'd have to open up the shelter and then communicate that to everyone via their modes i can't just use tv because somebody might not have people or watch tv i've got to use social media i can't just use social media because somebody might not have access to internet or they might not do social media so i need to use something else podcasts or broadcasts or something else so it's extremely important that we use as much technology as possible to reach as many people as possible but also keep in mind that technology can't solve everything with public information because we still have people who have technology limitations or do not have access so that's where things like printed materials flyers newspapers and different things will come into play and our public information and communication about the response and recovery that we're doing so looking at public information then now later so back in the day once again word of mouth was a really big one and believe it or not even during disasters now a lot of survivors actually hear about things through neighbors and through word of mouth so technically it is still something that we leverage but that was one of their only modes back then also newspaper and print because people were more reliant on getting their news that way before we had what we've had currently radio am FM was heavily utilized we had things like magazine local papers cable and news and then billboards that were printed nowadays we have an explosion of different ways that people consume information electronically and so while some of those thens we still use like newspaper and some of those to cover some of those holes the majority of people nowadays are using things like social media streaming services internet and media on the news but online podcasts which is a big one and then electronic billboards now as opposed to the print which can actually be a big benefit to us because we can change what's on it easier with social media the a really good example that i want to cover with that is the twitter spaces so if anybody's super familiar with social media on this presentation you'll know that twitter has this new thing called a space where you can go and start a space and people can join it and it's basically like a live podcast where somebody's talking about something they can invite somebody else to open their mic and contribute to the conversation and then other people can just listen if they want to and there's no written anything so there's no written comment section there's no written chat it's all just verbal so a few months ago they actually had a pretty big issue in virginia just south of dc with about 14 inches of snow on i-95 and unfortunately a lot of people drove even though there's going to be 14 to 16 inches of snow and the rates were too high for the the snow plaza keep up so a lot of people got stuck on the interstate and they were stuck there for i believe 24 hours or at least over 16 hours they were stuck there overnight and it was really neat because somebody actually started a space on twitter who was stuck down there to talk about things and give updates so all these people stuck in the middle of that snow disaster would go on social media trying to find information of when they're going to get out what's v dot saying are they going to come rescue me they got in the space and they would share things like hey does anybody have food like i don't have any food in my car or i didn't bring any fuel or i'm really cold does anybody have anything and they shared information and shared resources to keep everybody safe and alive out there and as an emergency manager i find that fascinating because we're constantly seeing people do that even if it's on facebook groups or whatever during disaster people are sharing information and sharing things but with a space anyone could listen so at one point i hopped on it and listened to it from up here just to understand what was going on and listen to perceptions but it's extremely valuable if i'm an emergency manager down there because then i'm getting information i'm understanding how they're being impacted so even though we typically say social media is great like we could post and we can find pictures of damage and all that that's great but social media is still evolving and opening up a lot of really cool abilities to be able to put public info out and share communications and then looking at later so that's where i really want to cover the vr and ar depending on how people consume information in 20 years 30 years 50 years whatever that looks like we have to evolve in government to deliver our information to that so is that going to be something that we do with vr are people going to be constantly doing things in vr and we have to figure out a way to deliver information that way so some people are working on digital eyewear and things like that can we deliver emergency information via digital eyewear so it pops up when they're in danger i don't know those are all really cool things that sit back and think about from a geeky level and then too just digital delivery how can we continue to develop and produce that information and pass that on to them whatever way that they're doing it so my focus here like i said social media very passionate about it and we continue to use it in public safety to get information out so you'll see that i have a tweet up here from boulder oem which was just from last week when they were doing fire evacuations again you'll see that they have a ton of engagement a lot of retweets likes things like that it's still a big thing and people really do expect public safety agencies to deliver information like that so if you're not doing it as opposed to the agency you're very behind the curve because you get criticized quite a bit now for not doing it that way we also have the tweet at the bottom showing a pretty big decent fire social media continues to be a great way to also tell people what's happening in their community areas to avoid especially when they have a lot of roads closed that building could possibly collapse if it gets damaged enough so putting that out in real time helps people know to not go into that area for safety reasons and then we continue to use it to solicit feedback from the community listen to perceptions about the response do rumor control which is really important deal with misinformation which is extremely important on social media and if you're doing social media and public information you're actually listening to what people are saying and you're designing your next release or your next government information based on what people are saying to correct that if there is a big rumor out there that's not true or if people did fall into a misinformation trap you want to figure out a way to address that in the next release so people understand all right mapping so mapping in GIS is huge and mostly it's because back in the day we used to have 10 maps to show things so we had a map of government buildings we had a map of a floodplain we had a map for land use and a population map and now in GIS because it's digital we can take all these different layers and stack them onto one map and look at everything from above and it's just really amazing especially because we're doing so many crossover things like providing transportation so we need to know the routes providing sheltering so we need to know where our vulnerable areas are and look at like census and population data flooding because I don't want to put my shelters in the middle of the flood so I need to know where that floodplain is to actually plan that right so mapping has always been big in our response we cannot make decisions without knowing location but really digital mapping has been massive like I've mentioned looking at it back then hand sketches drawing meteorology actually used to do all their weather maps by hand and by sketching and color pencil and it's really cool to see those they're very intricate but it takes so much time and that's something that technology has really saved us because making these digital forecast maps or these maps for topography or anything that we need is very quick we use a lot of GIS a lot of remote sensing now also we use a lot of modeling the drone surveys which I already talked about and then also we have some cool things like the google car that totally drives by itself but it's constantly taking pictures doing surveys things like that just to get the maps and then later looking at where technology could evolve from mapping perhaps we could have automated drones that we could just send out and we don't have to have somebody doing that they could be scanning and doing all that reporting back to us once again virtual reality how can we leverage being in a virtual space and mapping that space or using that kind of technology to better collect that information than we already are crowd sourcing so a really cool idea about or even tracking which could be potentially creepy it's figuring out how we can crowd source and track different locational information based on people we've already seen that a lot unfortunately with some of the social media companies and advertisements with figuring out where people are going based on their cell locations and then trying to pop you ads based on where you've gone so that's already constant but how could that be leveraged for disaster mapping or disaster needs or something like that I don't really have any answers but it's very interesting to think about and then focusing on GIS and digital data so we are really trying to get away from just making disaster decisions off the cuff and we're trying to be more data driven because the complexity behind what we're doing just requires it we cannot be effective without having data and using it so something that's been really popular as of the past few years but especially during COVID is taking a look at social vulnerability so looking at our census data whether or not it's socioeconomic status language, housing access, transportation access which is extremely important for us to provide if we need to do an evacuation and overlying that into a social vulnerability scale so then we can map that out for our county and see what areas of our county are the most vulnerable and what areas are the least that helps us a ton because we can target outreach so we can go into those high-risk areas and really leverage a lot of our education on being safe taking steps during the disaster making sure that we're providing our social media and also our outreach information in that language that they speak rather than just doing it in English making sure that we're opening shelters and things like cooling centers and warming centers in areas that actually need them so being able to map out based on SVI where they would be utilized and easy to get to easy to access and then lastly making sure that we're providing recovery information based on that as well is really beneficial especially if we can get data on insurance so who has blood insurance in the county who doesn't those areas that don't are going to be hit the hardest because they're not going to have coverage and they're going to have to figure out another way to recover because they're not going to have that all right i'm looking at the clock so moving it to situational awareness here this is really important because like i said we're really trying to keep track of real-time information on what's going on outside what's going on with our people what do we need to provide information so that might be monitoring dispatch calls and traffic it might be watching media reports or television in the EOC it also might be getting ground reports either from first responders but also from residents and our community groups it could be monitoring social media for people sharing information about what they need it's also getting information from volunteers out in the field and then lastly establishing cameras and streams so we can actually physically see what's going on out there so back then really just relied on radio traffic a word of mouth and just media but now we're using social media a ton once again to crowdsource bosses in the next slide so i'll cover it then camera systems so out here in the virginian-maryland area we have extensive cameras all over our highways and our interstates and everything and i know texas and text doc does as well a little bit but that's very valuable to be able to look out there and see if i'm doing a giant evacuation and my gridlocked do i have water on the roads is there a really big traffic accident or do i have really big protests shutting down my interstates cameras are just very valuable to be able to see what's happening so we can take action with that and then later so looking at some other ways i did mention that apple watch 911 dial i think that's a really cool way to be able to data share or situational awareness of whether or not someone is safe or not besides biotech that we might be able to do that with other things in disaster perhaps if everyone had a smart watch we could send something out and say do you have food do you have water and you just click yes or no and we collect all that information that would be really beneficial and really helpful if everybody had that but once again too we have to think about people we don't and then to that self home reporting system being able to have those home systems understand the status or the integrity of the home would be extremely beneficial for things like damage assessment or just home security and then even having it send audit reports if we did somehow collect damage based on home systems that would be really cool and then lastly can be reporting system so continuing to utilize technology to get those reports back similar to what we do on next door and social media but through some of those more advanced technologies that are popping out so boss is so cool and i have done other presentations on this at other times so i'm going to keep it short but boss is basically a volunteer team that you train up to go on a social media and look for reports for you they vet and confirm that the reports are not photoshop or fake and then they deliver those reports to you in your EOC or your command posts or whatever and it's really helpful for things like damage assessment when we're looking at how hard we got hit shelter opening if i need to make a call on to open a shelter or not utility outages trying to figure out move as key or water or what and then debris management trying to figure out if i need to activate some serious debris contracts to bring dozers in to clear roads and clear out some of that stuff all right so community preparedness sharing information with people on fire safety disaster readiness having kits and then community events and historically we have spent a lot of time doing this with foods at fairs going to classrooms doing a lot of different community outreach we've also done things like neighborhood events also emergency contact stuff on paper really haven't utilized technology a ton back then now we are starting to use social media once again to touch on those who are constantly using it you do see some public safety agencies having tiktoks trying to do cool dances on fire safety and things like that to try to get it to the teens and some of our youth that are constantly on social media we are trying to develop things like readiness phone apps and then readiness reminders to get people to remember to do things like check your food kit check your water change your batteries your smoke alarms we are seeing a lot of more cell phone apps and things like that that we're trying to convince people to do cloud storage once again trying to get people to put their documents on secure storage sites and the documents we're talking about are things like your insurance paper where all those things that you're going to need in the event that your house gets wiped away and you have to make calls and start rebuilding a lot of those papers potentially could be ruined and then it's not going to do any good when you're trying to do that so cloud storage is really helpful for community fairness and then many of us are trying to do youtube videos demos and trying to really use streaming to help us share that information and share it more widely than we possibly could previously. Looking at being prepared just later and this is what really excites me is the use of virtual reality VR and AR as you can see in that picture that's actually something the weather channel does on their tv during hurricanes and during floods to show people how high the surge could get historically when we say 10 foot 15 foot surge that doesn't always resonate with people but if you show them that a 10 foot surge would put the water over their roof then they're like oh wow that's a lot of water i should leave so it's just another way to visualize risk and communicate visually which i think people are more accustomed to doing as opposed to trying to figure out the map in their head so we could show risk like that we could potentially do some outreach to where we could go into our flood plain areas and show them what it would look like if they add 100 year flood how high the water would come up on their house if they saw their house flooded they might take more action to make sure the net flood insurance or make sure that they were ready for that next flood i'm trying to use VR to develop neighborhood networks so a lot of the social networking social media is trying to go into the VR realm in the future and so leveraging that with that people share information with each other help each other because we know in disaster management that the government does a lot but we can't do everything and so we're constantly trying to leverage community it really does take everybody helping everyone to be able to have our community recover and rebuild and move on evacuations there have been discussions about things like tesla and then other cars that are driverless what that would look like in the event that we did an evacuation some have actually brought up making evacuation plans for driverless cars and it might be a way to just throw people in a vehicle and get them out and not have to worry about things like bus drivers and things that we typically have to plan for when we're providing transportation so that's a very interesting newer thing that i've seen pop up and then lastly the home systems thing like i said we have home systems that can detect things and really help us remember everything we're supposed to do for maintenance like our smoke wires meet our detection on our roof and gutter maintenance all those little things that you do for your house to make sure that you can withstand a storm or a disaster i think that would help everybody because we're all just very busy so we typically forget when we're supposed to do a lot of that so one last focus before i wrap everything up just taking a look at VR preparedness this is actually an example of something that FEMA put together to demonstrate flooding and they're working on trying to roll this down on a local level but they're in a very early stages so basically simulating what a potential flood would look like and putting someone in that situation and then also having them make decisions so if we teach someone how to get out of a flood we could put them in that and have them do that action and it also makes for a lot more realistic training first response including fire and police are also looking at this because while they do a lot of live training and burn buildings and other things this might be another way to put them in critical situations and have them go through those motions as opposed to just sitting in a classroom and kind of reviewing what that response would look like and with that if you ever want to chat more emergency management or preparedness stuff with me i'm very active on twitter at miss ashes92 or you can send me an email that is my my project email and i will respond but i just want to thank everybody for being here for giving me an hour of your time and for just listening to me talk a lot about technology and my fashion so thank you guys so much yay that was great thanks ashley sure i have a question i'm just blurting it out i do fundraising and i'm just wondering is the government going to do you think fund some of the vr and the future tech to support emergency response do you think they are or is the private sector maybe i'm gonna jump ahead i think the private sector always has a leg up just because of funding and just the way that it works but i have seen government interest in it when i was at fairfax county before i came up here to baltimore county our community engagement was actually looking at that because fema is very close to rolling out some kind of trailer program where you can actually have them show up and do that for you so it's like a little trailer with the tech so we're almost there i don't know how long it'll take for communities to be able to have that money to buy it for them but i think that we'll start to see more programs in the next five years okay thank you actually for a fantastic presentation we really appreciate your time i did want to remind everyone that on bay took our next event it's going to be on how do i protect my donor and client data from cyber attacks i have dropped that link into the chat if anybody wants to go ahead and sign up but other than that i didn't see any questions pop up in the chat did anybody have anything real quick where we let actually go there's one that just popped up from rural wad about what's the best way to start working with homeland security and government agencies is that in term of tech i think so probably yeah so i will say while many of us understand the use of tech and the use of being data driven in that our field does need to evolve a little faster at that and so it depends on where you are and the receptiveness of that but the best place to do that and expose different agencies to that is conferences so having a booth at a conference or doing a presentation at a conference as well as just going to jurisdictions and doing demos things like that is and i would also say social media to linkedin but you just have to get out there and expose your product and also technology to a lot of different areas and see if it sticks and david did you have a question you wanted to ask i did can you hear me okay yes they're texas tech alumni one has i said the information in the chat aka the snow begin two it was 96 hours and they had a whole bunch of stuff going on and there's a lot of issues going on with that stuff happens that sort of thing you talked about national disasters hurricanes wildfires stuff that's not necessarily county driven i.e. of multiple jurisdictions how do you fix that issue when you have because national disasters don't really excuse me don't really care about jurisdictional boundaries like for example hurricanes and wildfires etc how do you for lack of a term cope with all that information all that capability all the situation awareness yes you saw some you said something about situation awareness from the public standpoint what about the put situation awareness and everything from the first responder standpoint because everybody wants to go home safe and sound etc etc and i made i made that comment in the chat saying that one CAD system is not going to work on everybody that's not going to work because that's going to be a jurisdictional nightmare so thank you guys yeah no i completely agree and i guess what i would say is regional planning is really key so we talked a lot about planning a lot about thinking about things and being ready for it before you really have to do the same thing with your neighboring jurisdictions because like you said the disaster is going to come in and in fact your neighbors as well and you really need to leverage some of the different regional programming and and different things that you have dc is great example of that because as many people might know they do have a CAD system and a regional mutual aid system for their fire departments and their first response that already is cohesive all the different counties have different numbering it all meshes together it's absolutely amazing and i wish that all the regions would think about doing things like that because i think that it makes mutual aid and response a lot easier when you build it into everyday stuff as opposed to trying to figure out how you're going to how you're going to respond and do that stuff in the middle of the disaster so i would encourage more regional planning more regional exercises more regional projects like alert systems CAD all of those things to make sure that you can puzzle piece all those together when you need to terry i think you have a comment hey can i jump in but yes hello everyone thank you actually for the presentation could you recommend some kind of these conferences that you mentioned that we can be in we're new to the u.s not more than a month now and we build uh we automate the entire process we build flying houses that are operated by drones and they assemble into buildings automatically whenever a disaster happens we are raising money to develop the technology obviously but we also require adoption from homeland security or any government agency that can test this technology with us so how is the process usually happening in the u.s and yeah what's the fastest route into trying because like it's a whenever disaster if you want to get to test as fast as you can yeah so it's similar to what i just said it's always better to shake hands before the disaster in times of call and make relationships that way build trust than trying to do it in the middle of a disaster when we're in disaster mode tensions are high very stressed out obviously very emotional because the place that we're serving and we love is usually destroyed so we're trying to figure out all this stuff and we're under a lot of stress and so it's always better to have partnerships and reach out before so going to conferences such as like state associations every single state has a state level conference that they hold and they're always looking for vendors and boots and stuff like that presenting at those conferences as well there's also the iam conference which is our national emergency management association that a lot of people are involved in they actually have a tech committee that is dedicated to looking at disaster tech and focusing on how we can use technology in emergency management so that might be another way to join that group and be in there and work with emergency managers but yeah try to build it before obviously not everybody can so in the event that you do have to try to reach out to someone who might have just got hit with a product or something try to be understanding at least of their time because we're very busy so like i've had some vendors be very helpful to reach out and do demos and be there for us but i've also had some that were aggressive and trying to sell me covid stuff or whatever that might be so just be tactful and helpful but try to build before the disaster that's the best key to the success that you can ask and just for anybody who's not looking in the chat tell you that she could unmute and i hope i'm saying that correctly but her comment was that DHSSAT funds research programs like that for augmented virtual reality that's awesome yeah that's news to me so i will be looking into that i think that is really cool and based on what we know with just human behavior and like risk communication people have to see things to understand like for instance we see a lot of people they get the tornado learning and they don't go take shelter they go outside because they have to confirm with their eyes that there's a tornado before they do it so i could just see so much potential for using ARBR for outreach but also communication during disaster somehow okay any other questions see people are starting to drop off so i think we probably covered it very well ashley i really appreciate your time everyone who has commented has come in on what a great presentation this has been we will certainly have to have you back i do see that david is asking if you could throw your contact information back up real quick i'm sure everybody probably like to make sure they get that okay you've got it there in the chat that's perfect and i think your twitter is also on the event page if anybody wants to look there so with that thank you everyone for attending tonight again don't forget we have several more good events coming up actually really appreciate it we will definitely have to have you come back and speak to us again soon and with that thank you everyone have a great evening and we will see you all again next time bye everybody thank you for having me carolin