Why it matters

Why information sharing?

Emergencies such as wildfires, floods and storms are:

  • Extended: often lasting days or weeks rather than hours.
  • Dynamic: moving and changing rather than remaining stationary.
  • Complex: often involving multiple simultaneous individual incidents.
  • Multi Entity: involving multiple organisations rather than a single organisation.
  • Distributed: often being spread over kilometers or tens of kilometers rather than meters.

They have before, during and after phases and are effected by other types events for example:

  • wildfires are effected by forest management, and
  • floods are effected by urban development.

Therefore, managing these emergencies requires sharing information:

  • between phases,
  • between event types, and
  • in real time between entities and distributed teams during the incident itself.
Emergencies such as wildfires are extended, dynamic, complex, multi entity and distributed.
Managing emergencies such as wildfires, floods and storms requires sharing information between teams who may be kilometers or tens of kilometers apart – they are not all located together at the same location.
Emergencies such as wildfires, floods and storms require information to be shared between multiple entities who are involved in responding to the incident.
Emergencies such as wildfires, floods and storms require information to be shared between before, during and after phases.
Emergencies such as wildfires, floods and storms are affected by a range of different types of events.

Error prone, slow and data silos

Current methods of sharing information are error prone, slow and result in data being siloed where it is unavailable in future incidents hindering continuous improvement.

The most common methods of sharing information in emergencies is radio and phone. If you described this scene to someone in another location using just your voice, how accurately do you think they could reproduce this scene?  This is currently the most common method used to create shared situational awareness between geographically distributed teams, including between responders and the operations center.

Not seeing the whole picture

Each responder can only see a small part of the incident. To generate the complete picture of the incident, the operations center must manually piece together multiple descriptions, usually provided verbally, of what each responder can see. This is slow and error prone.

To see the whole picture it is usually necessary to manually piece together multiple descriptions, usually provided verbally, of what each individual responder can see.

The spatial information bottleneck

Up to 70% of information shared during emergencies is spatial (map based).  A Geographical Information System (GIS) specialist is usually required to share spatial information. GIS specialists are usually located within the planning function and hence are not ‘in-line’ for sharing information between many of the creators and consumers of information, including between responders and the operations center. That is, sharing information between creators and consumers of information who are ‘in-line’ requires the information to be ‘detoured’ ‘out of line’. This creates a bottle neck between the creators and consumers of information.

Up to 70% of the information shared during emergencies is spatial. The need to involve a GIS specialist to share this information causes a bottle neck between creators and consumers of information.
GIS specialists are usually located within the planning function and hence are not ‘in-line’ for sharing information between many of the creators and consumers of information. For example, sharing spatial information between (a) and (b) requires that information to be detoured via (c). That is, sharing spatial information between creators and consumers of information who are ‘in-line’ requires the information to be ‘detoured’ ‘out of line’.

No single source of truth

As a result of the bottle neck in sharing spatial information, a common site in operations rooms is people drawing on paper maps to maintain their situational awareness. As soon as they do this, there is no longer a single source of truth.

People in operations rooms often draw on paper maps to maintain their situational awareness. As soon as they do this, there is no longer a single source of truth.

No shared situational awareness

Solutions which enable:

  • information to be transferred from responders to the operations centre but not from the operations centre back to responders or between responders, or
  • require the browser page to be refreshed before changes are visible,

,reinforce the highly dangerous situation of everybody having different situational awareness – a lack of shared situational awareness.

This problem is particularly acute with solutions that:

  • involve manually adding data (e.g. via pdf’s) from multiple responders to maintain a common operating picture in the operations center – in a rapidly evolving incident, this manual processing quickly overwhelms the operations center resulting in a loss of real-time situational awarness, or
  • require responders to refresh the page on their browser on their device to see the latest changes (there is currently no mechanisim to force the page on browsers on distributed devices to refresh) – how do responders know when new data has been added and they need to refresh the page?
Solutions which enable (a) information to be transferred from responders to the operations center but not from the operations center back to responders or between responders, or (b) require the browser page to be refreshed before changes are visible, result in a loss of shared situational awareness. In this scenario, the operations room could not discuss the blue square with responder 2 because they will not know it even exists.

Effect of poor information sharing

Collectively, these information sharing problems result in poor access to information which leads to:

  • poorly informed, or misinformed, decisions and actions, and
  • reduced tempo of decisions and actions.

This makes it difficult for decision making and associated actions to keep pace with incident development which increases the impact of the incident and reduces the safety of responders and the community.

US research indicates that, on average, every one minute delay in implementing an appropriate action at the beginning of a fire, adds 17 minutes to the length of the fire.

Waters and Fuller, 2020
Poor information sharing makes it difficult for decisions and associated actions to keep pace with incident development, increasing the impact of the incident and reducing the safety of responders and the community.
Failure to keep pace with an evolving incident increases the impact of that incident.

Poor access to timely information at the incident level means accurate information cannot be passed to higher hierarchical levels in a timely manor – this includes higher hierarchical levels within a single organisation, at the state level or the country level. This reduces the ability of those at higher hierarchical levels to make timely and informed decisions which can have a compounding effect on the impact and safety at the individual incident level.

Poor access to timely information at the incident level reduces the ability of those at higher hierarchical levels to make timely and informed decisions.

Solving this problem at higher hierarchical levels requires solving the information sharing problems at the individual incident level.