Executive Summary
Rainfall started impacting Northeast Tennessee days before Helene made landfall so that on September 27, 2024, catastrophic flooding impacts from Helene brought massive amounts of debris which destroyed numerous homes, infrastructure, and utilities.
the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) faced a critical operational challenge: coordinating a sustained, multi-week disaster response across state agencies, regional offices, local emergency management partners, volunteer organizations, and field operations while maintaining a connected and situationally aware State Emergency Operations Center (SEOC).
The Northeast Tennessee Disaster Relief Center was established just days after the storm at Bristol Motor Speedway in Bristol, Tennessee. The large community partnership was supported by TN National Guard and State Guard Volunteers, the Unicoi County Chamber of Commerce, United Way of East TN Highlands, Eastman Chemical, and Sunbright Rentals. The Center opened on October 2, 2024, and was operational for 135 days. The Center served as a donation hub to support survivors and fulfill requests for impacted counties, organizations, and local communities.
TEMA’s mission required more than activating emergency operations. It required bringing together multiple organizations, systems, users, and communications channels into a shared response environment. As flooding impacts expanded across Tennessee and neighboring regions, TEMA needed to ensure that executive branch agencies deployed to the SEOC, regional personnel, local emergency management partners, volunteer organizations, and field staff could communicate, share information, access response systems, and coordinate missions in real time.
To meet this need, TEMA partnered with Strategic Technology Solutions’ (STS) IT team to sustain the technology foundation required for emergency coordination. STS supported the systems and services that allowed TEMA to collaborate across organizational boundaries, including network connectivity, account provisioning, device deployment, Web Emergency Operations Center (WebEOC), Microsoft 365 and Teams, access to the state’s secure virtual private network (VPN), phones, mobile devices, conference room technology, A/V monitoring, command center displays, and situational awareness systems.
As the response escalated, STS shifted into an elevated support posture to meet TEMA’s operational needs. This included 24/7 on-site coverage during the first week of activation and continued elevated support for two weeks. Through this partnership, TEMA was able to support more than 150 users, all executive branch agencies deployed to the SEOC, four regional offices, local emergency management partners, volunteer organizations, and field operations.
The results were immediate and measurable. TEMA maintained a connected emergency operations environment with 100% network uptime during the activation period, sustained WebEOC as a primary emergency coordination tool, preserved SEOC A/V monitoring and situational awareness capabilities, supported three conference rooms, and avoided vendor escalations. This enabled operational briefings, resource coordination, damage assessment, situation reporting, logistics coordination, public information coordination, local/state/federal coordination, remote access, and field connectivity.
By identifying the operational need and leveraging STS as a technology partner, TEMA ensured that emergency response remained connected, coordinated, and mission-focused during a major disaster. The project demonstrates how emergency management agencies can use enterprise IT partnerships to strengthen cross-agency collaboration and improve disaster response outcomes.
