Smooth collaboration on fighting wildfire
Background
When you think of Zeeland, you probably think of the sea. But Zeeland has a lot of land as well. Beautiful areas full of dunes, forest, moorland and grass. Beautiful, but also vulnerable. Especially to fires, which lurk in spring and summer. Wildfires are unpredictable, spread quickly and can pop up anywhere. This makes it hard to fight them.The Safety Region is the regional organisation for crisis management. It’s doing everything in its power to prevent wildfires. Numerous public and private organizations play a part in prevention. From the fire brigade to Staatsbosbeheer and from camping owners to beach pavilions. It’s important that cooperation between these organizations runs as smoothly as possible. That’s why Zeeland Safety Region asked us to run a pilot.
Questions from Dekmantel
- How can we optimize coordination between different organizations?
- How do we ensure that all stakeholders continuously get the latest, correct updates?
- How do we provide clarity in division of tasks during all phases of risk management?
- How do we get a real-time overview of all actions required to ensure a safe environment?
- How can we continuously collect and share operational information?
Our solutions
We discussed information management first: which organizations play what role in fighting wildfires? And what information do they need? We also looked at which organization has access to what information and when. And how information can be of use to other organizations in the operational network. We poured all this information into the Safesight app. Making sure every organization gets the right information in the app when it needs it.
It all starts with a risk analysis
Risk management was up next. We dove into the different stages of upscaling when fighting risks of wildfire. And which tasks for the various organizations are involved. This includes extra information for those involved, but also concrete tasks such as closing off paths, scaling up supervision in certain areas and extra restrictions for camping owners.For each phase, the Zeeland Safety Region has a complete blueprint with all actions, checks and tasks for the operational network to perform. These are automatically sent from our database to the right people during an upscaling. Thanks to the user-friendly task management system, the safety region is able to quickly brief everyone on ad hoc tasks.
‘All operational information is converted to various dashboards. This provides us with a clear picture of everything we should pay extra attention to. At any time.’
Marc Nagelkerke, Specialist Operational Information Management Safety Region Zeeland
Marc Nagelkerke, Specialist Operational Information Management Safety Region Zeeland
Preventing a crisis or calamity
All things related to risk of wildfire is recorded in a cloud-based log. Reports of dangerous situations for example, but also fires that have been discovered and temporary closings. Everyone reports in the same way by working with fixed codes and locations. This means all collected management information is immediately clear to everyone.On various dashboards, stakeholders can see in real-time how the operational network is performing. A dashboard with all tasks provides insight into tasks that already have been completed – and which are still open. A risk dashboard draws the user’s attention to specific risks if a task is yet to be done.
Smooth cooperation is essential to guarantee the safety of inhabitants and visitors of Zeeland. This pilot is a nice first step to a safer Zeeland. Together with the Zeeland Safety Region, we’re now fully occupied with taking the next step.