DENVER, CO (Sept 2014) - Incident Response Technologies, Inc. (IRT), a Denver-based company, is proud to announce that the Rhodium Incident Management Suite (Rhodium) was successfully deployed to manage the accountability and credentialing of over 300 public safety responders at the 2014 BMW Championship. The BMW Championship, hosted this year at the Cherry Hills Country Club in Cherry Hills, Colorado, is the third of four FedEx Cup playoff events on the PGA Tour schedule. The event was expected to draw as many as 30,000 attendees per day and presented unique public safety challenges.
During their seven-day response to the tournament, South Metro Fire Rescue and the Arapahoe County Incident Management Team were able to put their Rhodium software to valuable use. The IMT’s resource unit was able to utilize a brand new module in Rhodium to pre-plan staffing assignments for the event, notify personnel of their assignments, and issue event-specific badges. These badges included a QR code that could be scanned at the check-in station using commercial-off-the-shelf computers and tablets. Public safety responders with six local law enforcement agencies, three fire departments, Douglas County OEM, Colorado State Patrol, and the FBI were credentialed with Rhodium. In total, Rhodium accounted for over 5300 staff hours during the weeklong event.
“Rhodium’s resource accountability tools enhanced the event’s resource unit by rapidly checking-in and checking-out responders, and providing on-demand real-time accountability and work-rest analytics: number of resources checked-in and number of hours each resource has worked throughout the incident. Rhodium’s utilities quickly deploy using standard Windows, Mac, and Mobile devices and printers,” says Thomas Lombard of the Arapahoe County Incident Management Team.
The event also served as an opportunity to test the Usher digital identification system. Usher offers a mobile identity solution or application that replaces traditional physical IDs with mobile identity badges on a user’s smartphone. The Usher platform works seamlessly with the new Rhodium credentialing and accountability tools, allowing responders to check in and out of incidents using their smartphone.
“Rhodium’s partnership and integration with Usher enhances resource accountability by utilizing responder’s smart devices,” says Lombard. “Rhodium and Usher are creating and improving upon incident accountability standards so that incident commanders, command and general staff, supervisors, and responders can obtain real-time situation awareness of what is occurring on an event or incident.”
“The ability to validate identity, track incident management resources and communicate critical situations in real-time is crucial to public safety,” says Christian Campagnuolo, Senior Vice President of Marketing for Usher. “By bringing all those capabilities to the Smartphone and seamlessly integrating with existing software, Usher’s advanced mobile security technology is effectively reinventing traditional security standards.”