Receiving a federal disaster declaration has real world consequences for the State of Oklahoma, its constituents, the local and tribal governments, and its businesses. To meet eligibility thresholds, the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management (OEM) must rapidly collect and validate hundreds of damage assessments from all of Oklahoma’s eligible entities. Then, OEM must present its results, now mostly virtually, to FEMA on a case-by-case basis with project-level dimensions, descriptions, and repair estimates. This is a time-sensitive, often chaotic process with millions of dollars at stake.
Using Crisis Track
Using Crisis Track for damage assessment would be a large process improvement over OEM’s existing Esri Survey 123/Field Maps solutions. Crisis Track is specifically designed for helping governments identify disaster costs and complete FEMA forms whereas Esri’s disaster solutions is designed for map-based situational awareness.
Overview of the Functionality Comparison:

Specifically Tailored to Meeting FEMA Needs
Crisis Track software does more than situational awareness. We have built tools within the mobile and desktop applications to help applicants get through disaster management processes and overcome common hurdles. These include:
- Damage assessment data autocompletes FEMA paperwork for the JPDA and for cost reimbursement
- Mobile time tracking capabilities that feed project worksheets for Category A and B cost reimbursements
- Mobile location reverse geocodes to the local address point instead of the point where the field team stands
- No limits on photos taken in the field for a given damage assessment
- Better damage assessment field editing capabilities that allow users to search and filter entries
- A Quality Assurance checker that runs through damage assessments to identify common errors such as duplicates, no photos, and no damage categories.
- A photo gallery module that centralizes all photos collected from an incident with photo-stamping options
- Outputs for FEMA Essential Elements of Information that import into the FEMA Grants Portal to prepare applicants for the Recovery Scoping Meeting.
In addition, Crisis Track’s licensing model has the flexibility emergency management needs: no limits to the number of users accessing an account. Counties can setup accounts for other departments to conduct their infrastructure-specific damage assessment. They can create jurisdictional views inside the account for municipalities to participate using their own teams and tasks. Counties can even setup volunteers, such as CERT, whose time can be applied to the FEMA cost share. By not just focusing on situational awareness, Crisis Track fills a critical gap in functionality to be a complete disaster management tool.
Local Data Optimizes the Process
Crisis Track’s advantage is that we process and maintain local government infrastructure data before the disaster happens. We collect and load the dimensions and replacement costs for buildings, public utilities, bridges and culverts, and electric utility assets. Crisis Track then uses this data to prepopulate web and mobile-based damage assessment forms with accurate data. This is makes damage assessment much easier for your field teams; they no longer have to type “guestimated” answers to dozens of questions with their thumbs.
Because we use are address points and parcel GIS layers, backend processes after damage assessment field operations are dramatically reduced. Data collection results already have:
- Damage estimates derived from improved land values
- Damage assessment locations placed on the house (instead of where the field user stands in Survey 123)
- Validated addresses from local address data
- Parcel identifiers that can be used by building code officials and tax assessors for the recovery phase
These optimizations greatly improve data collection accuracy and speed the time for the preliminary damage assessment data validation processes.
Turn-key, Fully Supported Solution
There are implementation and support costs for Esri solutions. While Esri supports their base products, their solution template implementations are often overlooked and left to the customer’s GIS/IT staff to take on. It’s why South Dakota moved from Survey 123, the “self-developed” solution to Crisis Track:
"Even better, because it is a fully supported product, the burden on DHSEM Staff to use the product successfully is much lower than for a self-developed product.”
- Dustin Hight Recovery Branch Chief South Dakota DHEM
During our implementation, Juvare focuses on doing the more tedious work: outreach, data processing, setup, and training. Then, after deployment we fully support all users of the solution.
Crisis Track Integrations Enhance Value
Emergency Managers want interoperable products running within their EOC. To meet this goal Crisis Track has two turn-key integrations: ArcGIS Online and WebEOC
Our ArcGIS Online integration will pass all disaster consequence data from Crisis Track to ArcGIS Online feature services. These feature services can then be added directly to previously created dashboard or other Esri products. This interface is not incident based, which makes it is much easier to set up and maintain.
Secondly, Crisis Track has an enhanced integration, also easy to set up, to take advantage of the two products’ synergies.

The interface includes:
- Crisis Track damage assessment data that populate damage assessment boards inside of WebEOC
- Time records established in WebEOC that automatically transfer into Crisis Tracks.
- Resource Requests and Significant Events identified during a damage assessment will populate the appropriate WebEOC boards
- Single Sign On between the products
Our goal is not only to make your disaster management processes more efficient, this integration makes your WebEOC investment more valuable by monetizing captured operations data into FEMA cost reimbursements.
Fully Supported Solution
Crisis Track will provide your users with support when you need us the most. We have 24/7/365 support for all Crisis Track users: from State to the volunteers assisting municipalities. This reduces the burden of the GIS staff for supporting a damage assessment application on top of the hundreds of other tasks during an activation.
The support expectations come best from the clients we serve. In an unsolicited review after an activation last summer, the Connecticut Director of Emergency Management sent us this:
“I wanted to take a quick minute and thank you for the amazing responsiveness yesterday and quick thinking to identify a solution for us as we navigate the damage assessment process here in CT. I understand we are not fully operational, yet you all jumped right in and helped us solve a time sensitive problem. This level of customer support is unbelievable and immediately confirmed coming over to Crisis Track was the right move and a company we want to do business with."
- William Turner, Emergency Management DirectorConnecticut Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security
In another case, when asked during her presentation at the 2024 Juvare User Conference, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management GIS Manager stated:
“I'm a [GIS] shop of three people for the entire state of Virginia for my agency in any of our emergency support agencies or partners. So having another set of folks who are very response oriented when something's going on is fantastic. [The Crisis Track team is] very responsive and they're fantastic and it helps us expedite the process.”
- Jennifer McKee, GIS ManagerVirginia Department of Emergency Management
Our support team is fully committed to be there when you need us the most.
Currently, much of OEM’s damage assessment processes are Esri-based for situational awareness. By providing Crisis Track to the State’s emergency managers, applicants can more quickly complete the required FEMA paperwork to get disaster assistance to your constituents when they need it the most.