The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology has awarded a contract to further develop a program planning app to deal with emergency situations.
DHS S&T awarded a contract for $1, 542,113 to Corner Alliance, Inc., https://www.corneralliance.com a small business consulting firm based in Washington D.C and Boulder Colorado.
Antwane Johnson, Director of FEMA’s Integrated Public Alert & Warning System (IPAWS) https://www.fema.gov, reports, “There is a growing need to push actionable information to the public quickly in order to deal effectively with emergencies.”
The funding will enable continuation of the DHS S&T’s partnership with FEMA to create the IPAWS Program Planning Toolkit. The Toolkit is aimed at assisting public safety agencies in minimizing alerting delays, planning for future alerts, warnings, notifications, plus improve information sharing and interoperability among emergency management and public safety officials.
The documents in the IPAWS Program Planning Toolkit were produced based on recent innovative changes to technology from emergency managers, public information officers, alerting originators, and administrators.
“FEMA and DHS S&T’s plan is to expand the toolkit into an online user-friendly format to allow stakeholders to download and print pre-filled planning documents with information”, said DHS S&T Program Manager Norman Speicher.