I think the better question is: during a life-and-death fire rescue effort, is it a better use of time to use Airtable as a backend or to write, deploy, and operate a concurrent editing backend yourself? There's a clear answer here.
Good point but most states have disaster relief infrastructure already in place for events like this? If this was scrounged up the day of it would make sense.
If you think local government has IT infrastructure just for disaster operations, or if it does, that you can add a user to it in less than two business weeks, then you haven't worked in local government.
I have worked in local government, and have dealt with these departments. While most cities probably dont have this infrastructure, most states do and open it to local muni's for these exact scenarios. Like I said if they had to create something last minute this is great, I was just surprised at their appreciation to scale something to 60 users.
I think scaling it to 60 concurrent users editing Airtable at the same time without a hitch and able to onboard someone to be useful within 10 mins of them coming in the door was what we liked.
That state may not be, the one I worked for was, specifically setup to come to the aid of muni's in cases of emergency. But these plans and contingencies were obviously created out of previous tragedy/experiences.
Why do you believe most states have IT-related disaster relief infrastructure in place? I worked for several years in CA govt, I would be surprised if anything beyond the major metros has much in place for coordinating shelters, etc. In fact, the sonoma fires are documented to have had lots of problems with reverse 911.
I have been eager to explore the available tools for disaster relief because it seems like people scamble to DIY a solution for every disaster. I made my own Firebase relief matchmaking service when we had a 100yr flood a couple years ago. I would love to see easily deployed crowdsourced open-sourced tools that can be used as soon as possible in these scenarios.
I have and there was always IT-related disaster plans and policies. But admittedly I have not worked in most states in this capacity and definitely not in CA so my experiences are limited.
