Dade County also used Crisis Track to track the County’s labor and equipment time spent working on disaster-related activities. The system has the ability to store inventories of labor and equipment rates and track time automatically through the mobile application. However, with the recent purchase Dade County had not yet rolled out training to the Public Works Department before the incident occurred. So, Alex’s team manually entered time records into the system. With the selectable labor and equipment inventories, the system still made manual entry much easier and serves as a good example for how a manual collection process could be done. FEMA Public Assistance data show that grants covered all hours reported inside of Crisis Track.

With additional responsibilities being placed on emergency managers at local levels, smaller county and municipal emergency managers like Alex are implementing stress and time saving efforts to alleviate pressures during disasters. During this disaster, Dade County not only saved time during the local damage assessment, but also accurately tracked financial expenditures. The electronic data collected helped reduce typical State and FEMA issues associated with the financial aspects of disasters and provide their community the ability to receive much needed assistance in a timely manner.