Emergency Management
Writing an Active Shooter Plan After a Real-World Threat
Brief #
OB-2026-6
Date Prepared
Status
Active
Population
137,000
Team Size
3 Personnel
Military Background
25 Years
Initial EOP Crosswalk Score
99/140
Applicable to
Emergency Management
Fire Departments
Law Enforcement
Corporate Security
Higher Education
Healthcare
That trust barrier falls down when the AI has a barrier in place that says, 'this is what's valid, we've tested it, we've pushed it against the policy.'
Brandon Vance
Emergency Manager, Florence County, SC
Mission Outcomes
In just three hours of total platform use, Florence County has accomplished the following:
Active Shooter Plan Rewrite
EM1 produced a complete revised active shooter plan in under 20 minutes.
Plan Length
29 Pages → 15 Pages
After-Action Review
Florence County's exercise AAR was drafted almost exclusively by EM1, reducing roughly 20 hours of manual work to 20 minutes.
AAR Draft Time
~20 Hours to ~20 Minutes
Gap Identification
EM1's crosswalk engine scored the existing EOP at 99/140, surfacing specific compliance gaps the team did not know existed.
Compliance Visibility
Unknown Gaps to Scored Assessment
1
Situation
When Brandon Vance took over as Emergency Manager for Florence County, South Carolina, he inherited a massive portfolio and a three-person team responsible for protecting 140,000 residents. Eight months into the role, a reported active shooter at a local university forced a full-scale response. The threat turned out to be a false alarm, but the response was real, and the after-action review exposed gaps in multi-agency response and coordination. With the county's annual review of its Active Shooter/Hostile Event Response (AS/HER) Plan already due, leadership directed Vance to update the plan. He saw an opportunity. "Why don't I run this through EM1," he told the Deputy Administrator. "We'll make sure we meet all of the requirements, and we'll probably find gaps we don't even know exist."
Real-World Wake-Up Call
A university active shooter threat exposed interoperability gaps across Florence County, making the AS/HER plan rewrite an immediate priority.
2
Breaking Through the Trust Barrier
Vance describes himself as a skeptic. He had been using ChatGPT for drafting and research but found it unreliable for policy work. "It pulls anything from the internet and says that must be a fact because it's in print," he said. "I wasn't saving time with the harder tasks." What changed his mind was EM1's citation system. Every generated passage links directly to the source document it drew from. "I've clicked on those references more times than I can count," Vance said. "That trust barrier falls down when the AI has a barrier in place that says, 'this is what's valid, we've tested it, we've pushed it against the policy.'"
From Skeptic to Champion
Vance moved past his distrust of AI when EM1's citation system let him click through to verify every source directly, something open-source tools could not provide.
Cited Sources
Closed System
Policy-Valided Content
3
Agent Mode and the AS/HER Plan
Vance uploaded Florence County's existing Annex 13 into EM1's Agent Mode, alongside the documents in his library. He used the Enhance button to refine his prompt, then asked the system to produce a more concise AS/HER and mass casualty plan. Within twenty minutes, EM1 returned a complete draft that cut the plan from 29 pages to 15 while improving clarity. The system converted dense paragraphs into tables, flagged missing inputs like tactical channel assignments, and identified that the county's interoperability communications plan needed stronger jurisdictional boundaries codified in the EOP. "It took things we had to explain in whole paragraphs and put them in a table," Vance said.
29 Pages to 15 in 20 Minutes
EM1's Agent Mode produced a complete AS/HER plan draft that was shorter, more concise, and surfaced interoperability gaps the team had not identified.
Agent Mode
Enhance Button
Plan Comparison Engine
Crosswalk Builder
4
Expanding Across the Team
The impact spread quickly. Vance's technical hazards coordinator sent the same planning request to both ChatGPT and EM1. ChatGPT returned a skeleton of empty headings. EM1 produced a fully developed plan that correctly interpreted specialized chemical hazard terminology and acronyms. Vance has since used EM1 to draft an AAR for a state full-scale exercise and generate a training outline for the county's Local Emergency Planning Committee. He now advocates for the platform at conferences and in conversations with neighboring counties.
ChatGPT vs. EM1, Side by Side
The same prompt produced empty headings from ChatGPT and a fully developed chemical hazards plan from EM1, complete with correct technical terminology.
5
Assessment
Florence County's next milestone is a full rewrite of its entire Emergency Operations Plan and all nineteen annexes. Vance estimates EM1 will compress what traditionally takes a year of incremental work into hours of focused sessions. "EM1 condenses that desk work so I have more bandwidth for the things that matter," Vance said, "building relationships, strengthening my CERT program, engaging with county leadership." His director put it more bluntly: "If I had had EM1 from the start of my career, I would have saved ten years of work."
From Desk Work to Field Work
By compressing months of plan writing into hours, EM1 frees Vance to invest in the relationships and community programs that define effective emergency management.
