Amanda Bowen, Emergency Manager, Dona Ana County (NM), Office of Emergency Management
During disaster-driven power outages, Doña Ana County’s Office of Emergency Management faced a challenge familiar to many EOCs: no single, reliable picture of where deployed resources actually were. Generators supporting critical lift stations were being tracked through a patchwork of whiteboards, spreadsheets, sticky notes, and radio traffic, or what Emergency Manager Amanda Bowen calls “aggressive improvisation.”
The consequences were real. During one activation, three separate staff members had three conflicting updates on the same generator; one thought it had arrived, another believed it was still en route, a third assumed it had been reassigned. No one was right.
“Disasters are the absolute worst time to realize your resource tracking system is really just vibes and dry erase markers,” said Bowen.
Doña Ana County integrated portable magnetic GPS trackers directly into their existing WebEOC environment, giving the EOC real-time visibility into generator locations, delivery routes, and other deployable assets, without adding a separate system or new learning curve. The result was faster, more confident operational decision-making. As Bowen put it: “You can’t effectively manage resources you can’t see. This gives you the opportunity to see those.”
“The goal was to improve operational visibility using the tools that already fit into our existing workflows. We weren’t having to have an outside tracking system. We’re using WebEOC that we’re familiar with and already using in the EOC.”
“The first time we watched a generator moving on the map in real time instead of waiting for three phone calls to verify it, everybody in EOC immediately understood the value.”
