Name is Bill Turner. I’m the state emergency management director here in Connecticut at the division of emergency management homeland security. We’re responsible for the statewide coordination, planning, preparedness, response, and recovery, as well as mitigation for all hazards that may impact Connecticut. We get to work directly with our one hundred and sixty nine towns and two tribes.

One of our biggest hazards is flooding. We are coastal. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a hurricane, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. But we also have, major thoroughfares that could include hazardous materials incidents.

It’s a small state, but we’re very densely populated. We got a small team of about forty five people that work really hard to keep everyone here in Connecticut safe, including those that travel through or just visiting. So I’ve been in the role about two and a half years now. And, when I started, we were doing a lot of damage assessment old school.

You know, we were using Excel spreadsheets and paper forms, and we didn’t really have a technology or a software solution. When I came on, there was just a a lot of increasing frequency and intensity of disasters and things happening where we were doing the damage assessment process more frequently. I started looking at solutions and talking to the team and we had some of our towns that were already using Crisis Track here in Connecticut. It wasn’t deployed statewide but we we looked at it as a viable solution and did some demos and had some conversations and realized that it really was a good product that could help us with that gap of having a statewide software that could allow us to do damage assessment more effectively and efficiently.

We were able to successfully use it just recently even though we’re in the middle of our rollout with the historic flooding event that we had and we’re able to successfully prove that it does meet our needs and has allowed us to to do exactly what we wanted to do by getting to a potential federal declaration a lot quicker. Back in August, we were forecast to have a minimal risk of flash flooding, here in Connecticut, a couple inches of rain. And throughout the day, it just it kept raining. It was a Sunday.

By the end of the day, we had towns that had received over fourteen inches of rain in less than twelve hours, and it just devastated a section of our state over three counties with historic catastrophic flash flooding. And we knew that Monday morning we were really gonna have to hit the ground running with some sort of ability to collect the impacts from the storm. So, that night we kind of got everybody out of the EOC and said, you know, go home and rest up, be ready to hit the ground running on Monday, and, start basically doing that damage assessment. So we weren’t really planning on using Crisis Track because we were only about, you know, a quarter, maybe halfway through our implementation.

So we were we weren’t really there yet, but because some of the other towns were using it, we knew that they were gonna use it. And one of our towns did us a favor and shared out a link, for their resident self reporting. And the news ran with it that that was the statewide link to report damages. So I quickly panicked and called into, my friends at Crisis Track and said, hey.

I got an issue here. What is the possibility that you could turn on our system right now, redirect that link, and get us live with resident self reporting statewide? And, you know, I thought maybe it was gonna be we can do it, but it’s gonna be a few days or whatever the situation. But it was like, we can do that right now.

And they dropped everything, and it was truly amazing and, turned it on for us and got us up and running on our prices track that morning. And, that’s what we ran with. We weren’t trained on it. We hadn’t used it before, but we were able to use the job aids and the self help tools and people that knew how to use it from the towns and successfully launch it with the resident self reporting as well as our preliminary damage assessments with FEMA.

And we had a huge success rate from our towns. They really stepped up and did their job and helped us with that resident self reporting, giving us locations to hone in on, to go and find that damage. You know, I think it’s just having that that direct impact knowing that you’re you’re helping your community or or your your residents. And I think a lot of people just do this because they know that they’re making a difference and helping people on sometimes their their worst day of their lives.

So, you know, people really needed help and getting out their boots on the ground and just just talking with the residents and finding out what their needs were and that sense of community all coming together to figure this out. Just being part of that to me is what keeps me going and makes me coming back to work every day. In terms of working with Juvare, I I had used the WebEOC in a previous role, gone through a transition, to that product as well as, you know, the state of Connecticut’s been a customer of WebEOC for for some time. I I would just say, you know, it’s always been a good relationship.

One of the nicest things I like about WebEOC is there’s such a big network of customers already on it that maybe you can’t figure out what you needed to do, but there’s probably somebody out there that has. So that community of just networking and sharing ideas amongst the WebEOC administrators and not having to recreate the wheel sometimes and the flexibility and customization of the product. Our jobs are always evolving. What we’re dealing with and what we’re seeing, every time we think we have all our dashboards and and boards built out, there’s always something that comes along or always another elected official or a new governor that wants to see something different.

So having flexibility is huge. And in terms of Crisis Track, I would say that truly out of the box, hitting the ground running, we were able to just spin it up and go. There’s some things that are required on on the user end and the town end and the state end to provide data, but it’s really a minimal lift. And that’s been the best part of it is that even without all the data to make it perfect, you can use it.

And we were able to show that it does work. And that’s what we’re looking for. We don’t have time to spend years debating about the specifics. We just need products that work and that we can just plug in and play and run with it.