COVID-19 Surprise, Arizona: Bringing 1st Responders Together While Keeping Them Apart

3 min read
The Surprise, AZ City Hall

Background: According to the World Health Organization (WHO), COVID-19 is now a pandemic, meaning a global outbreak of disease. Due to the outbreak, city governments face new challenges in keeping their first responders and other essential employees informed while also keeping them safe from exposure to the virus. However, the city of Surprise, Arizona already had its solution: Evertel.

The Client:  Surprise is a city in Maricopa County, Arizona. More than a year ago, Evertel deployed its secure messaging platform throughout the city of Surprise to its police force, fire department, and city government. 

The Challenge:  The city of Surprise built an EOC (Emergency Operation Center) in a massive room to gather essential staff during times of crisis. When the city faces a disaster, weather event, mass protest, or emergency, they open up their EOC. Department heads, city leaders, first responders, and others coordinate in this room to run all city operations, manage the response, evacuations, and resources from within the EOC. 

Then the COVID-19 outbreak began. Due to the fast-spreading nature of this novel coronavirus, gathering this large group of essential employees together posed a serious risk of the virus being spread amongst them. With social distancing and demands that groups larger than 10 avoid gathering, the EOC could not be operated as normal. They faced a new challenge: how can they operate the EOC while practicing social distancing to mitigate the potential virus spread?

The Solution: Thankfully, the city of Surprise, Arizona already had a solution. More than a year ago, Evertel deployed its compliant crisis messaging platform throughout the city of Surprise to its police force, fire department, and city government. Because they had already experienced Evertel’s benefits during calm, when the COVID-19 outbreak began, they were ready for the crisis.

  • The City of Surprise has deployed Evertel as their “Virtual EOC”, meaning they can accomplish ALL of the goals and missions of the standard EOC, but remotely and even more effectively using Evertel — with no risk of transmitting the virus!
  • Inside the Evertel app, they created specific COVID-19 emergency rooms to manage all of the directives, procedures, and updates to all employees. Now the city of Surprise is running everything for the COVID-19 response from a multitude of private rooms.
  • In milliseconds, every single employee has the latest intelligence. Each update is minimizing their exposure and risk, keeping their employees safe and ready to respond with the latest procedures, tools, equipment, and supplies.
  • Evertel is the ideal solution to provide virtual, secure, and immediate messages and conferences for ever-important first responders. 

The Result: Once Evertel’s support group aided with the implementation of this “Virtual EOC”, the city of Surprise soon realized they could coordinate their entire COVID-19 response from the safety of their smartphones. The city no longer had to gather large groups of essential staff into a very contentious space. They could practice not only social distancing but complete separation. They can remotely handle each and every crisis with Evertel and never have to be in the same room!

“Our entire EOC and IMT (Incident Management Team) is existing only because we have Evertel. I know some teams that are working in Google/Microsoft, but Evertel is kicking butt for us on a virtual EOC stand up.”

Emergency Management Director for the City of Surprise

Contact Evertel today and be ready for ANY crisis, disaster, emergency, or critical incident!

We provide free staff training and implementation assist through every stage of implementation.

Don’t let a few dollars per user, per month stop you from advancing technology the same day you start using Evertel!

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