Your Plan Is Only as Good as Its Worst Assumption (Copy)
In this issue: Kentucky Emergency Management connected all 120 counties into one operating picture without buying a new platform, and Doug Eades of KYEM joins BES CEO Chris McIntosh to show how in a July 8 webinar. Jamie Jacobs, a former firefighter, paramedic, and Esri geospatial strategist, joins the BES team. Former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate launches Fugate: Unfiltered, an unedited column for the emergency management community. Jim Featherstone's Ground Truth series adds practitioner-authored essays on crisis leadership. BES opens six GIS and OSINT roles, four new this quarter. And BES heads to Esri's Safety & Security Summit (ES3) and User Conference, where Kentucky Emergency Management and Harris County, Texas, present on the main stage.
Getting more from the tools your eoc already owns
When a crisis hits, most EM teams are still piecing together a picture from disconnected systems, separate dashboards, spreadsheets, phone calls, emails, texts, and maps that don't talk to each other. The data exists. Getting it into one place fast enough to act on is the hard part.
On Wednesday, July 8, at 12 PM ET, Doug Eades, Information Systems Supervisor & GIS Lead at Kentucky Emergency Management, and Chris McIntosh, Co-Founder and CEO of Bent Ear Solutions, will show how KYEM closed that gap across all 120 counties without buying a new platform.
No sales demo. Just two practitioners, one hour, with a live Q&A.
Welcoming Jamie Jacobs as Director of Technical services
Jamie Jacobs brings more than two decades of experience spanning emergency response, public safety, and geospatial technology. She started her career on the front lines as a firefighter, EMT, and paramedic on special operations teams, working on wildland fire, swiftwater, high-angle, and mass-casualty missions. She founded Rocky Top Medical, where she built mobile GIS applications for emergency medical deployments in some of the world's most austere environments. Most recently, she served as a Senior Geospatial Strategy Consultant on Esri's disaster and humanitarian crisis team.
"Every solution I've built started with listening to the responder, the dispatcher, or the person who has to live with the system at 3 a.m. That's at the core of Bent Ear Solutions." — Jamie Jacobs
New from former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate
A newsletter for the EM community written entirely by Craig Fugate, sponsored and distributed by BES, and edited by nobody. The arrangement is on the landing page in plain terms: BES doesn't get a vote on what goes in it. Nobody does.
Expert Insights: Ground Truth
Explore Jim Featherstone's new Ground Truth series, practitioner-authored perspectives from three decades in emergency management, spanning roles at the LAFD, as General Manager of the Los Angeles Emergency Management Department, and active service supporting LA's 2025 wildfire response.
Two of five entries are live. The Disaster Always Has a Vote takes on the gap between plans and frameworks. A Forced Fit argues that HSEEP was never built for the executives making crisis decisions.
Know any GIS wizards?
BES is hiring across the board. Currently open: Senior Project Manager, Senior GIS Manager, Senior GIS Developer, GIS Analyst, Senior GIS Analyst, and OSINT Analyst/Consultant. Four of the six are newly opened this quarter.
If you've built on the Esri platform and want your work to land in emergency management, critical infrastructure, or public safety, we'd like to meet you.
What’s ahead: ES3 & UC
We'll be at Esri's Safety & Security Summit (ES3) July 11-12 and the User Conference through July 17, where two BES clients are presenting on the big stage at ES3:
Kentucky Emergency Management on how KYEM and state partners built KERMIT, a GIS-based incident management system running on ArcGIS Dashboards, Experience Builder, and Microsoft 365 following the Connected Framework.
Harris County, Texas, will discuss how it is breathing life into hazard mitigation planning by making local risk explorable for residents through its existing tech stack.
Coming to San Diego? Stop by our booth or reach out to schedule a time with the team.
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