43 Keeping Communities Safe The inspection dashboard was used often for briefings to share disaster response progress. Working with the deputy chief, Hogan and her team created a survey that brought together all the state requirements for documenting storm damage. “It was a field solution we could deploy on iPads and iPhones and laptops,” Hogan said. “Essentially what we did is take screenshots of everything the state had in its application and mimicked it on our side for the inspectors to use.” Implementing the Solution in the Field On Friday morning, at one of the fire stations that still had power, the chief called his inspection teams into the conference room and went over how to use the Survey123 app. He had about an hour to get them up to speed. He started with the goals and processes. At each dwelling, they were to plunge a measuring stick into the water, snap a photo, and load the photo into the app. They needed to capture the address and record contact information for the occupant. Finally, they would create a clickable point on the map that linked to all the information. “We put the phone up on the TV screen and just walked them through it,” Lucas said. “We did a practice run using the fire station as the point. Everyone did their survey; it was simple and easy.” Live Dashboards Connect Leadership On the big conference room display, Lucas and city leaders watched as the map filled up with completed inspections. The deputy chief directed his teams based on the patterns of destruction that were revealed. “Every time the chief saw a new cluster of damage he would go up to the board and click the inspections to see what his team members were submitting,” Hogan said. “It was just really cool to see how involved they were.” To speed the process, the GIS division shared a link to the dashboard with SERT members so that they could follow along from Tallahassee. “They could see the projection that we would hit their threshold, and this helped them get ahead of the planning,” Hogan said. “The live dashboard was just tremendous for us to get it done quicker,” Lucas added, noting that earlier in his career, these types of assessments would have been mailed to the governor’s office as handwritten notes and printed photographs. “They could see we had a real flooding problem and were ready to come down.”
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