Case Study: Major Urban Center speeds emergency response and protects residents during natural disasters with BlackBerry AtHoc

How This Major Urban Center Keeps Its People Safe During a Natural Disaster

A densely populated urban borough of nearly two million people, prone to earthquakes, floods and volcanic activity, needed to improve emergency response beyond its existing sensor and public warning systems. While monitoring networks could alert the public, officials faced slow, disorganized internal coordination and delays in gathering field information, so they required an affordable, resilient, two‑way crisis communication platform that integrated with legacy infrastructure.

Working with a crisis‑alert specialist, the borough deployed BlackBerry AtHoc in three months to automate multi‑channel alerts and enable two‑way field reporting (photos, video, geotags) via AtHoc Collect. Today 120 staff use the platform to notify hundreds of thousands, speed boots‑on‑ground responses, and coordinate relief; officials completed a post‑crisis diagnostic in eight days, delivered rapid relief funds, and estimate savings from a single disaster exceed the annual cost of the solution.