Running an incident in the EOC

An incident in CivilSense is the container for a response: the tasks, the resources committed, the people involved, the status board, and the log of what happened when. It exists so that everyone working the event is looking at the same picture, and so that the record afterwards is a by-product of running the response rather than a reconstruction of it.

Creating an incident

Create one from Incident Management. Name it after the event, not the date — the name is what partner agencies will see, and "Highway 12 Flooding" is more useful to them than a timestamp.

Create the incident earlier than feels necessary. An incident opened during the monitoring phase captures the decisions that shaped the response; one opened after activation starts the record halfway through the story.

The common operating picture

Once an incident exists, four things build the picture:

Tasks. What needs doing, who owns it, and where it stands. Assign an owner at creation. An unassigned task is a note, not a task, and it will still be sitting there at the shift change.

Resources. What is committed to this incident, drawn from your equipment and supply records. This is what makes the resource picture real rather than remembered — see tracking equipment and supplies.

Participants. Who is working the incident and in what ICS role. Roles drive what people see and are what the generated forms are populated from.

Status board. The shared view. Its purpose is that the incoming shift, the partner agency, and the elected official asking for an update all read the same thing.

ICS forms

The platform generates standard ICS forms from the incident record: the incident briefing, the incident action plan, the incident status summary, the resource request, and the activity log. Because they are generated from what you have already entered, they reflect the incident as it actually stands rather than what someone remembered at form-filling time.

Generate the status summary before you are asked for it. It is the form most often needed at short notice and the one most painful to assemble by hand.

Sharing with partners

An incident can be shared as a live link with agencies that do not have CivilSense accounts. They see the current picture, updating as it changes, without needing a login or a copy of anything.

This is the alternative to the situation report emailed every two hours, which is stale on arrival and forks into as many versions as there are recipients. For structured coordination across agencies — resource requests and mutual aid rather than shared visibility — see multi-agency federation.

After the incident

The activity log and task history are the raw material for an after-action review, already timestamped and attributed. Close the incident when the response ends; the record stays available.

The most useful thing you can do at closure takes two minutes: note what the record does not capture — the decision made on a phone call, the resource that arrived late and why. That is the part nobody remembers in six months and the part the next activation needs.

Availability

The EOC suite is an Agency capability — see pricing.