Crisis Track Key Concepts
Incidents contain modules and features used to collect and manage data about events, such as disasters or large gatherings of people. Managing incidents and working within them is a key part of the Crisis Track workflows.
Jurisdictions are used to organize data from smaller administrative areas, such as municipalities inside a county, within your account and restrict which data people can manage. Jurisdictions contain many of the modules and features found elsewhere in Crisis Track, such as the Teams and Tasks modules.
Account administrators can view and manage data in the account and each jurisdiction, and they can add jurisdiction administrators and users to jurisdictions. Jurisdiction administrators and users can only view and manage data for their jurisdiction.
Jurisdictions are optional and are typically created during the initial account setup, at no additional cost.
Entries are forms used to collect data about an incident. Depending on the type of form you select, different types of data will be collected. For example, if several commercial buildings were damaged by a tornado, and you want to collect data about the damage to those buildings, you would create entries with the Commercial Damage form.
Tasks are different jobs and work that need to be done (residential assessment tasks, city facility assessment) and may or may not (EOC oversight) have a geographic component to them. These are the smallest units of activity that a team is responsible for completing. They should be limited to a single team and limited to 500 or fewer structure assignments, if structures are assigned.
Three types of tasks you might encounter are: Functional, Geographical, and Combined Functional and Geographic.
Structures are addresses within your administrative boundaries added to Crisis Track based on data you choose to share from tax assessment records.
Your Crisis Track subscription provides you with technical support to import a GIS layer of your structure locations with tax-assessed values. Structures appear on the maps in Crisis Track, and you can select structures while completing damage assessments or other types of entries. The Structures module allows you to view, edit, and delete the structures in your jurisdiction.
Administrators can use the Employees module to create an inventory of people whose time is tracked when they use Crisis Track to collect data about incidents. You add these people to Crisis Track as employees, even if they are unpaid volunteers.
Teams are also used for personnel resource management and can be updated as needed. Teams may align with groups of people in your organization that are doing specific jobs, such as by department or focus.
Crisis Track allows you to designate departments within your jurisdiction. These could include the police department, fire department, building inspectors, and so on. Employees in your jurisdiction can then be assigned to departments.
Equipment Records are akin to time records, where hours that equipment was in use can be tracked and edited. Equipment work hours are automatically tracked based on the Equipment Records Threshold status, defined when you create the incident.
Equipment with FEMA cost codes may be imported in bulk or individually by administrators using the Equipment Inventory module. This allows you to, for example, track how long a piece of equipment was used during an incident, which can be important for some FEMA forms.
You can use third-party map services to add map layers to the maps in the Operations View, Footprint, Entries, and Tasks modules. These map layers help you analyze incidents by displaying supplemental information such as symbols, patterns, and text. Commonly used map layers include election districts, fire response districts, evacuation routes, and sewer and water lines.
Preconfigured map layers make it easier to add a specific map layer to incidents. You can add preconfigured map layers when you create a new incident, or you can add them to an existing incident through the Info module.
Tracks are used to display the location and movement of users while they are on their shift in the field. The module shows not only the map with their track movement, but also their details, such as name, distance traveled, shift start and end time, location with date and time stamp for their entire shift, and the level of accuracy for that location.
An Area of Concern is a selection of structures relevant to the selected incident. You can add an AOC by manually drawing it, uploading a shapefile, or uploading a GeoJSON file.
Crisis Track provides customers who have purchased the Disaster Management or All Hazards Emergency Management product packages with Resident Self-Reporting capabilities. The Resident Self-Report is a short web page form that allows residents to self-report and describe the extent of damage to structures.
The form is available to all Active Incidents within your account and can be embedded on your local government website or shared via social media.
The Survivor Portal is an add-on that lets people affected by disasters submit information about property damage and personal needs through your own Survivor Portal website.
You can purchase this add-on independently of your Crisis Trackproduct tier. This add-on expands the functionality of the Resident Self-Report feature. Both features allow people to submit information about property damage, but the Survivor Portal also lets people describe their needs, such as lack of food, medicine, or transportation.