The Rhodium Incident Management Suite was widely used during the Big X regional training exercise that took place in and around Dallas Fort Worth in early November.
The 16-county exercise was sponsored by the North Central Texas Council of Governments and its 240 local government members. Numerous existing Rhodium clients in the area participated in the exercise, giving agencies the opportunity to put Rhodium to the test during a large scale event. Rhodium was also utilized by The Olson Group, the firm responsible for designing and coordinating the exercise.
In total, Big X included over 3500 participants representing 11 specialty disciplines including EOD, SWAT/SRT, EOC, USAR, Wild-Land Fire, EMS, Fire & Rescue, Tactical Medics, Emergency Management, and IMT's. The event was hosted at 40 venues across the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington Urban Area, the 4th largest Metropolitan Statistical Area in the United States.
Exercise planners utilized Rhodium to develop and distribute Incident Action Plans to all event participants. Rhodium enabled collaboration between the various control cells and helped to reduce radio traffic and phone calls. The use of GPS tracking within Rhodium allowed planners to visualize the location of key staff and VIPs at all times.
Several participating local agencies are long-time Rhodium clients and used the exercise as a way to test Rhodium in a large scale, multi-agency situation. "Big X was one of the largest events the Southern Regional Response Group has participated in," said Sgt. Heath Penwarden, SRT Commander for the Desoto Police Department. "Rhodium proved to be just as valuable and easy to use during this event as it is during our day-to-day operations. We used Rhodium to brief all of our special team missions during the exercise and to manage those missions in real time. The increased situational awareness that Rhodium provides is invaluable."
For more information about Rhodium Incident Management, go to www.irtsoftware.com
