Coordinating mutual aid across agencies

Mutual aid works over the phone right up to the point where it does not: when several jurisdictions need the same thing at once, when nobody can say what has already been promised, and when the person who made the arrangement is off shift. Multi-Agency Federation puts requests and fulfillment on one board that every participating agency can see.

Registering your agency

Register your agency with its type, jurisdiction, and members. The type and jurisdiction are how partners find you when they need a specific capability in a specific place, so make them accurate rather than aspirational.

Add members with their roles. Owners, admins and managers can post requests, make offers and accept or end partnerships; members and viewers see the board but cannot commit the agency to anything. During a response, "who at this agency do I talk to about this" is a question that should have an answer on the screen.

Partners

Requests go to your partners, not to everyone on the platform. Find a neighboring agency in the directory (by name or jurisdiction) and ask to partner; once they accept, each side sees the other's requests and can answer them. Either side can end a partnership. A request can also be posted to all agencies when the need is wide enough to justify it — every registered agency will see it.

Partnering here does not create an agreement. It mirrors the one you already have — the county compact, the automatic-aid MOU, the state system — so that the operational record lines up with the paper.

What a partner sees of your incidents

By default, nothing: a partner sees one of your incidents only when you share that incident with them. Under each active partner you can instead set a standing rule — view, or view and contribute (log entries, tasks, resources) — for every incident or only those where your EOC is activated (partial or full), optionally limited to certain incident types. Matching incidents then appear on the partner's EOC board without anyone having to remember to share them at 3am.

Two limits are deliberate. A standing rule never hands over control of an incident: to let a partner manage one, share that incident and choose manage. And a rule lasts only as long as the partnership — ending the partnership withdraws it at once, while incidents you shared one at a time stay shared until you revoke them. Each partner you share with, standing or single-incident, counts toward your plan's partner agencies: three on Agency, twenty-five on Regional.

Every time someone from a partner agency opens one of your incidents, it is recorded under Settings › Account activity on the agency owner’s account: who, from which agency, which incident, at what level, and whether a single-incident share or your standing rule let them in. One line per person per incident per hour, so a busy night stays readable.

The regional picture

On EM Regional, Regional Picture puts your agencies and every active partner on one screen: which of them have activated their EOC, the incidents they share with you and the latest approved SITREP on each, every open mutual-aid request in the region, and the operational equipment of any partner whose standing rule chooses to show it. It lists nothing the incident pages would not open for you — a partner that has set no standing rule shows as “single incidents only” until it shares one.

Posting a request

A mutual-aid request states what you need, how much, where it goes, and by when. All four matter. A request for "generators" invites clarifying calls; a request for a specific capacity, delivered to a named location (with coordinates if the staging area is not on a map), needed by a stated time, can be answered or declined immediately.

Priority uses the ICS 213 RR scale: routine, urgent or immediate. Be honest about it. A request marked immediate when it is not spends credibility you will want later, and a federation where everything is immediate conveys nothing. A request linked to an incident is recorded on that incident's timeline and in its after-action report.

Answering one

Partners see open requests and offer what they can commit, with a quantity and an ETA. A partial offer is worth posting — half of what was asked for, from three agencies, fills the request, and that only happens if partial offers are visible.

The requesting agency accepts or declines each offer; the responding agency marks the resource deployed when it leaves and returned when it is back. The request's own status follows the accepted quantity — open, partially filled, fulfilled — so the requesting agency can see what has been committed, what has arrived, and what is still outstanding without calling round to find out. A request can be canceled with a reason, or marked fulfilled when the need was met some other way.

Why the shared board matters

The failure mode this addresses is not that agencies are unwilling to help. It is that during a regional event, each is fielding requests it cannot see the others receiving. The same unit gets promised twice, or a request that three agencies could each partly fill goes unanswered because none could fill it alone.

A shared board fixes the visibility problem. It does not fix scarcity — when the region is short of something, it is short of it — but it stops the shortage from being made worse by everyone working from a different picture.

Standing agreements

Federation records what happened, not what is legally agreed. Existing mutual-aid agreements, compacts, and reimbursement arrangements continue to govern; this is the operational layer on top of them. Nothing posted here changes what your agency has signed, and the reimbursement paperwork still follows whatever process it followed before — though the fulfillment record is a considerably better starting point for it than a phone log.

Availability

The EOC suite is an Agency capability — see pricing.