Answer the following questions to the best of your ability. Make sure to read the scenario carefully and identify all key factors which will bear on the project.
This is not a composition exercise - you might write in outline format, write telegraphically, and use bullet statements.
You are the emergency manager for Cheyenne County in a western state. Cheyenne County is located mid-way between two main urban areas and has historically been a rural county. The county is half flat grasslands to the east, and half mountainous to the west, the Alta Grande range. The chief economic base has been cattle ranching on the grass lands and gold mining in the small communities of Broken Pick, Alta Vista, and Soapy's Revenge. County seat is Apache Wells, located in the middle of the county on the east side of the Alta Grande range. Interstate 91 runs north-south through Apache Wells. Apache Wells is served by a small airport with daily flights by three regional airlines, Mountain Air, Badlands Express, and Western Airlines. The main community in the grasslands is Fort Breckenridge, situated 15 miles east of Apache Wells. situated on the back side of the Alta Grande range 10 miles west of Apache Wells, the town of Chula Crossing is a rail yard for the Durango and Cripple Creek Railroad. Cheyenne County has a county emergency management agency. In addition, each of the incorporated cities or towns in the county (Apache Wells, Fort Breckenridge, Soapy's Revenge, Alta Vista, Broken Pick, and Chula Crossing) has an emergency manager, and some form of emergency operations center. The County emergency operations center is situated in the basement of the county courthouse in Apache Wells. At present the only method of communication between the county and citytown governments is telephone. County radios are not well-matched with town or city radio systems, which in turn are not compatible with each other. At the time the last major disaster, the Big Moab fire, that engulfed about half the county, including both grasslands and the mountain forests, the existing telephone system proved wholly insufficient for the task of maintaining communications among multiple county and city-town agencies and among the different EOCs. This was complex by the difficulty of tracking numerous evacuations and determining where people had gone. Additionally, cell systems became overloaded, rumour control systems broke down, and there was no efficient way to make information available at the same time to the news media and the public. You have seen a number of approaches to using the Internet to manage disaster information, communicate with response agencies, gather information from the public, and make information available to the public. These have included commercial web EOCs hosted remotely, commercial web EOCs hosted by the agency, and home built systems tailored to specific local needs.
1) Can such a web base EOC be a way for Cheyenne County to meet its coordination and communications requirements? What factors work in favour of a web solution, and what factors are opposed?
2) Suppose that a web based EOC is good enough solution, how will you define the needs for such a system. In other words, what does it have to be able to do?
3) Suppose that you have received approval in concept for the fielding of this system, how will you structure the plan for implementation?