117 Spot Reporting

Course Overview:

Spot Reporting is a new REACT course addressing how, when, and to whom to report a major emergency and disaster impacts in your area. A key component of information gathering by emergency management agencies, the National Weather Service, and the organizations you support by local or national Memoranda of Understanding is the development of ground truth information. Trained observers and a reliable reporting system can make a significant difference in the quality of information available for emergency decision making by verifying other reports and filling in gaps in what is known about the event. This is a function that any REACT member can perform.

Our Spot Reporting course covers:

• The Value of Information
• The Sources of Information
• A Reporting System
• What to Report
• How to Report
• When to Report
• And Then There Are the Bizarre Cases

The course manual is 15 pages in length and should take no more than 1 hour to complete. There is a detailed final examination – when you are ready, contact our training staff at Training@REACTIntl.org to obtain the web address and password for our online testing system. Continuing education units are awarded for course completion.

This course will not make you an expert in submitting Spot Reports. It is an introduction. Further practice can be had in our quarterly ALERTEX Internet exercise series. Get to know your supported organizations, review the Memorandum of Understanding, and identify with the supported organization what their information needs are. Do Team tabletop exercises in which reporting has a key role. When you develop proficiency, you will make a real contribution to improve REACT’s overall ability to be an effective communications partner for the emergency management community.