Episode 331: Where Have We Searched? SARCOP, the Common Operating Platform Behind FEMA USAR Teams with Jared Doke

Episode notes

After a hurricane, a tornado or a wildfire, search and rescue teams need three answers fast. Where do we need to search? Where have we already searched? Where do we go next? SARCOP, the Search and Rescue Common Operating Platform, exists to answer those questions on a map.

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy.

Jared Doke is a director at the NAPSG Foundation , the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS. His team built SARCOP on ArcGIS Online and supports all 28 federal FEMA urban search and rescue teams plus teams in 37 states.

Recorded at Interschutz , this conversation covers how the platform works, what it looked like on the Eaton fire, how a local agency gets onboarded, and where NAPSG is headed with training and a 24-7 operations branch.

Topics covered:

What SARCOP is and the three questions it answers

Built on ArcGIS Online, configured for urban search and rescue

Live layers: weather, flooding, post-event imagery and FEMA analysis

Track logs, waypoints, damage observations and hazards

The open training sandbox versus the locked deployment side

How a local technical rescue or water rescue team gets onboarded

All hazards pre-staging: tornado, flood, earthquake and wildfire

Surfside to Hurricane Helene and Milton, over 100 teams at once

The Eaton fire: pre-staging a week early and secondary searches

Ten in-person trainings this year and a 24-7 operations branch

SARCOP the product and SARCOP the service

So take a listen to hear what he has to share.

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources.

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Interschutz mini-series intro
2. 0:34 Jared's first Interschutz
3. 0:42 NAPSG and urban search and rescue
4. 1:00 What SARCOP is and how teams use the map
5. 2:24 Incident areas, search levels, and drone imagery
6. 3:19 How a department gets started
7. 4:13 Data partners: NC DOT, TomTom, NASA, USGS
8. 5:13 All hazards: ice storms, red flag warnings, wildfire pre-staging
9. 6:52 Post-fire secondary searches with wilderness SAR track logs
10. 7:44 Fast growth, more training, and 24/7 support
11. 8:56 Built for the boots on the ground

Questions answered in this episode

What is SARCOP and what does it do for search and rescue teams?

Jared Doke explains that SARCOP, the Search and Rescue Common Operating Platform, is a GIS solution designed to help teams on the ground after a major catastrophic incident. It helps them know where they need to search, document where they've searched, and figure out where they need to search next, while providing situational awareness on the incident.

Hear it at 6:15

How many teams and incidents does SARCOP support?

Jared Doke says SARCOP supports all 28 federal FEMA teams as well as teams in 37 different states. They are currently supporting over 100 incidents a year, about once every three days somewhere in the country.

Hear it at 7:50

What kinds of data can SARCOP pull in?

It can consume live data layers, weather feeds, flooding data, and post-event imagery. Jared Doke says they work closely with the FEMA Response Geospatial Office, so any analysis for exposed structures or flood analysis can be pulled directly into SARCOP and fed to teams on the ground.

Hear it at 6:15

How can fire departments get access to SARCOP?

Local agencies can reach out to NAPSG Foundation. Jared Doke says they prefer local agencies bring their own ArcGIS Online usernames, and any official public safety agency that responds to major disasters and has a technical rescue team or water rescue team can be onboarded into SARCOP.

Hear it at 0:25

What is the guiding principle behind SARCOP development?

Jared Doke says everything they do is for the boots on the ground. They don't want to push tech on people but make sure it fits into their process and helps them do their job, not make their job harder.

Hear it at 8:59

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Every five years, the fire service gathers in Hanover, Germany for Interschutz, the biggest fire and rescue show on the planet, to see what the rest of the world [inaudible 0:11]. We are on the floor capturing [inaudible 0:12] robots, command software, innovations and apparatus, emerging technology trends, and public safety. [inaudible 0:20] let us know what you think.

[0:22] Kevin Sofen: Alright, who do I got here today?

[0:25] Jared Doke: My name is Jared Doke and I'm with the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS Foundation, or NAPSG.

Kevin Sofen: Where in the world are we today?

Jared Doke: We are at Interschutz in Hanover, Germany.

Kevin Sofen: Have you been here before?

Jared Doke: I have not. This is my first time in Germany.

Kevin Sofen: It's like FDIC but like times 10, it seems like.

Jared Doke: On steroids is how I described it.

[0:40] Kevin Sofen: So Jared, what's your story?

Jared Doke: Yeah, so I'm a director at NAPSG Foundation where I primarily support urban search and rescue, and so we've developed the Search and Rescue Common Operating Platform, or SARCOP, and that's what we support, primarily teams in the United States. We support all 28 federal FEMA teams as well as teams in 37 different states.

[1:01] Kevin Sofen: So I've heard the word and the term SARCOP, but break it down for me. What does it actually mean and what does it do?

Jared Doke: Yeah, so it's a GIS solution that's designed specifically to support the teams on the ground. It helps them after a major catastrophic incident know where they need to search, document where they've searched, and then help them figure out where they need to search next, and then provide situational awareness on the incident.

[1:30] Kevin Sofen: And is it ingesting real-time data in some capacities, and the operator ability to kind of interact with the map? Tell me more about that.

Jared Doke: Yeah, so it's built on ArcGIS Online, because it's just basic GIS software configured for urban search and rescue. We can consume lots of different data layers. We pull in live data layers, weather feeds, flooding data, post-event imagery. We can pull in a lot of different data. We work really closely with the FEMA Response Geospatial Office. So any analysis they do for exposed structures or any kind of flood analysis they do, we can pull directly into SARCOP and feed that information directly to the teams on the ground.

[2:03] Kevin Sofen: Alright, so from what I'm looking at here, talk me through kind of that Monday morning quarterback. What am I looking at? How does it work?

Jared Doke: So [inaudible 2:09] the deployment side, which you need login access to. That side's locked down. But then we have what we call our training sandbox, and that's currently open for people to train with. We are doing a training right now. So NAPSG Foundation is doing a three-day training in North Carolina as we speak. And so they set up what we call an incident area. This is in Charlotte. And so teams have been out just doing training. So these lines here, they're called track logs. They show what kind of level of search they've done. So the yellow ones are primary searches, so we can see where that is. And then the teams can also drop what we call waypoints, and those kind of fall into four different categories. There's human interaction, so where someone's been rescued, you can document that, where they've been trapped. We do damage observations. These kind of colored dots show the different buildings and their level of damage. We also do hazards, so we can show where there's roads closed or maybe a hazmat incident. And then other logistical features such as these UAS launch and recovery sites. And they also did some flying for drones and were able to process that and bring it into SARCOP as post-event imagery.

[3:19] Kevin Sofen: And if I'm a small, medium, really any type of department, how do I get started using SARCOP? Is this something that you can kind of just sign up with an account, user account, or how does that work?

Jared Doke: Yeah, so [inaudible 3:31] we have our own ArcGIS Online organization where we host SARCOP, and we provide usernames to the 28 federal teams as well as some state teams. Some states like to bring their own usernames because they use them for other things besides SARCOP. But for local agencies that want to get onboarded, they can reach out to us. We like local agencies to bring their own ArcGIS Online usernames. We work with partner collaborations. We add them to a group that provides access to SARCOP. [inaudible 3:58] official public safety agency that responds to major disasters and has a technical rescue team or water rescue team, we can onboard them into SARCOP.

[4:10] Kevin Sofen: And I'm seeing down here, there's about 10, maybe more than 15 names, from state North Carolina DOT, TomTom, [inaudible 4:16], NASA, USGS.

Jared Doke: We have a lot of different data layers in the map, and these are kind of different data providers that we ingest. [inaudible 4:25] the map, we have some kind of static base data, critical infrastructure. We use USA Structures and some other data like that. This is some of the live feeds. We kind of have these broken up into a group layer, and then we have it by different disaster types. So SARCOP is kind of an all-hazards response platform. We've supported everything from a single building collapse such as Surfside all the way up to Hurricane Helene and Milton, where we were supporting over 100 teams at the same time. And so we need to be prepared to respond to basically any incident type across the country. So we pre-stage data based on different incident types. So we have tornadoes, flooding, earthquakes and wildfires are kind of our typical ones. And then on each incident, if there's local data or other data sources, we can bring that in as well. And we often have multiple teams responding to different incidents across the country at the same time. So we'll have Michigan Task Force One recently responded to kind of an ice storm, [inaudible 5:27] some recovery efforts there. We supported that at the same time we were supporting a tornado in the south.

[5:33] Kevin Sofen: And so you just gave some examples, and you know, whether it was a building collapse or a wildfire, but maybe actually leaning into wildfire, for example, could you talk me through, if I'm an incident commander and I'm utilizing SARCOP, from when maybe even we know there's a red flag alert and we're kind of concerned that a wildfire may occur, to then whether there's some kind of ignition, to then getting into full preparedness and deployment mode. Walk me through that kind of the mindset of an incident commander, and ultimately how they are interacting with SARCOP to make sure that they're best prepared, interacting their teams properly, and just setting themselves up for success.

[6:15] Jared Doke: I think a really good example that kind of illustrates that is the Eaton Fire. So last year we supported both the Eaton and Palisades fires. We knew that the conditions were looking like they were going to get some major wildfires. I think there were some red flag warnings. So we were looking at there may be an incident probably about a week before it actually happened. So we kind of pre-staged some data and started talking to some of the teams on the ground. Once the Eaton Fire went off, after it started burning through neighborhoods, some of the first responding teams that went in afterwards, they contacted us to see if they could use SARCOP to help them with their search efforts. And we supported that, and then once the USAR teams mobilized and deployed to the incident, they used SARCOP on that incident for post-conflagration secondary searches. And so we helped support that incident. [inaudible 7:05] one of our part-timers was a situation unit leader on that incident. So he was there, and we were supporting him remotely and making sure that we brought in post-event imagery. They were working with some of the wilderness search and rescue teams kind of on the periphery. We brought in some of their track log data, and then they just used SARCOP to manage that post-secondary search.

[7:30] Kevin Sofen: That's awesome. So what do you envision? Like, this is kind of a corny question, like what's your five-year plan, but more so from a SARCOP perspective, what do you see SARCOP and some of the work you're doing in the next one, three, five years?

[7:50] Jared Doke: [inaudible 7:50] good question. We've grown pretty quickly over the past few years. We've doubled the number of incidents we've supported year over year up until last year. Right now we're just at over 100 incidents a year. So about once every three days we're supporting an incident in SARCOP somewhere in the country. And so we've grown pretty fast. Right now we are doubling our efforts on training. So this year we're going to be doing 10 trainings across the US in person. That's going to double next year. And so I think over the next couple of years we're really focusing on training, because the better trained people are, the more efficient the platform is going to be. So we're increasing training. We are standing up kind of a more focused operations branch. So we're looking at 24/7 support over the next couple of years, and really getting out there and supporting the kind of intelligence function on an incident. We look at SARCOP as there's SARCOP the product, but then there's SARCOP the service. And over the next couple of years we're really going to be kind of building out that service part and providing an intelligence function for the teams on the ground.

[8:44] Kevin Sofen: That's awesome, Jared. Well, final question. This is sort of out of left field, but within your work, whether you do SARCOP or Esri, or even just in general in the life of Jared as a father, as I know you are too, is there any quote that you live by or any words of wisdom that kind of drives some of the work that you do?

[8:59] Jared Doke: Oh, that is a really good question. I think kind of the concept that we try to strive for is everything we do is for the boots on the ground. We don't want to push tech on people. We want to make sure that it fits into their process and it helps them do their job. We don't want to make their job harder. They have one more thing they have to do, one more thing they have to train on. Our goal is to really support the boots on the ground to make their job a lot easier. So I think that's kind of the lens we look through everything we do.

[9:25] Kevin Sofen: Love it. Well, Jared, keep up the good work. Thanks for all you're doing, and until next time.

Jared Doke: Thank you. Appreciate it.

[9:34] Kevin Sofen: Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Firefighting podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard, please drop us a rating, leave a message on social media [inaudible 9:41]. Have a great day, and together, we can advance the future of smart firefighting.