Crisis Track: Boulder County’s Marshall Fire

Crisis Track Supports a Collaborative Damage Assessment Process Following a Colorado Wildfire

Communities in the western United States are increasingly vulnerable to the potentially disastrous effects of wildfires. The ability of a local authority’s emergency management team to conduct damage assessments in response to such incidents is critical to the health and stability of the community itself.
In its 2022 response to the Marshall Fire—the most destructive wildfire in the history of Colorado—Boulder County used Juvare’s Crisis Track to streamline the frequently complicated damage assessment process and deliver tangible results to its community in the form of $69 million in FEMA disaster assistance.

Challenge

Due to the ever-increasing risk of wildfire, western-state communities such as Boulder County require a flexible, community-wide damage assessment and data collection solution that can deliver an accurate, real-time flow of information for improved emergency preparedness, response, and recovery. Yet the damage assessment process can be especially arduous; one of the foremost challenges faced at the county level is to rapidly collect accurate and complete disaster consequence datasets from various stakeholder agencies. Many of these agencies have their own uses for damage assessment information in addition to meeting state and FEMA needs.

Solution

Using Crisis Track—a data-centric damage assessment software—and a distributed field management process, Boulder County rapidly collected initial damage assessments from staff across multiple county departments, local towns, mutual-aid entities, and volunteer organizations.

Results

As soon as it was safe to enter the affected area, 30 damage assessment teams used Crisis Track’s mobile application to conduct 4,275 separate damage assessments in less than 4 days. Though initially based on FEMA’s Individual Assistance (IA) and Public Assistance (PA) data requirements, the damage assessments also met data requirements that the local governments needed for recovery. For instance:

Building Departments collected data for FEMA IA and building-safety placarding for permitting.
Resource Conservation (waste management) collected data for FEMA PA Category A debris estimates and mapped pickup locations/quantities to remove debris.
Public Works and Open Space (parks) completed infrastructure damage estimates for FEMA PA Categories C and G that eventually fed into their work order management systems to perform repairs.

Because of the data’s value to department missions, its accuracy and completeness improved considerably from previous incidents—so much so that FEMA and the Colorado Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Management, both of which used Crisis Track to see real-time damage reports from the field, had little to validate. This allowed FEMA to quickly open Public Assistance grants for all FEMA work categories. As of March 2, 2022, $69 million in FEMA disaster assistance has been awarded to the Boulder County community.

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Crisis Track Supports a Collaborative Damage Assessment Process Following a Colorado Wildfire

Challenge

Solution

Results

Download the Case Study

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