Secondary Impact Assessment (SIA)

Benefits of using Crisisworks for SIA

Real-time data collection for prompt and accurate information, enabling timely decision-making and response.
Comprehensive data collection, including photos and videos
Rich search and reporting options
Centralised and secure data management
Reduced risk of duplication of data
Paper based SIAs will not contain photos and may be short on details, such as key dates and names of inspecting officers.
Saves time and reduces errors by avoiding data re-entry

Use this Playbook to:

Allocate Recovery Cases to SIA Teams according to impact areas
Record impacted property assets
Conduct SIAs
Work with SIA data and generate reports
Export Recovery data to the EM Impact Portal (ERV)

Registers used for SIA

Recovery > Assessments
Recovery > Cases
Recovery > Infrastructure Assessments
System Administration > Import Data

Positions used for SIA

SIA / EHO (Environmental Health Officer)
SIA - Building Surveyor
MRM, MRM Deputy, MRM/MEMO Assistant
MEMO, MEMO Deputy

Workflow

Introduction

Secondary Impact Assessments may need to be conducted on impacted private properties in your municipality. These impacts can be reported to you in a number of ways, via Initial Impact Assessment data, via direct reports to your council or by your own officers reporting on observations in the field.

We recommend you first read our Playbook on Initial Impact Assessment Data, which covers importing IIA data.

What is SIA in Crisisworks?

Conducting an SIA on Crisisworks involves several steps:

Confirming that Damage is Confirmed to the property
Adding each Affected Private Asset to the Case and specifying the Damage level
Adding and conducting an Environmental Health Assessment
Gathering evidence such as photos and/or video for the Case
Adding Needs & Tasks to the Case for followup

Create a Case record

Currently, secondary impact assessments are done within the Case record, so each impacted property will need to have a Case record created.

A Case record can be created either from an Assessment Record (from IIA or FRV data or from ERC records) or simply by selecting ‘New Case’ to create a record from scratch.

The Case record is a dynamic form that presents various options based on entered responses. To add an Affected Private Asset, you must first add a property address to the record, and tick the Damage has been confirmed option under ‘Are any property, buildings or private assets damaged?

Prepare for SIAs

Make sure your Secondary Impact Assessment officers are set up as Users in Crisisworks, they will need to have one of the following positions:
- SIA - EHO (Environmental Health Officers)
- SIA - Building Surveyor
Set the Status of Cases to ‘Inspection Required’ (can be done as a bulk action)
Assign each Case to the relevant Field Officer (can be done as a bulk action)
To give the SIA Officers a head start, you can pre-populate the Case record with any information you have gleaned from the IIA, for example: add Affected Private Assets; add an Environmental Health Assessment; add relevant Needs & Tasks. The SIA Officer can then expand on the detail when they are onsite conducting their assessment.

Assigning

Tips for managing LARGE amounts of data

Preparation of batches: Since you may not know in advance who will be conducting inspections, pre-prepare batches of records. This allows for efficient allocation of tasks on the day.
Organise inspections geographically: To minimise travel distances, consider organising inspections into geographical groups or zones. This can help optimise the allocation of resources and reduce unnecessary driving. For example, there may be a creek, railway line or highway, this set up would prevent inspectors needing to cross in one inspection zone.
Batch assignment: Create batches, eg Batch1, Batch2, etc and tag the Cases with the relevant Batch number. You can then select them by their tag and quickly do a bulk assign to the Inspectors you have working on the day.

Create Inspection Zones

When managing large volumes of inspections, consider using inspection zones. These are predefined geospatial areas with designated names, allowing you to reuse the same search area multiple times. Use Geospatial layers in the Library to section up the impact areas so you can easily assign and work with cases within each section.

To do this, create a new Library Item, select Geospatial Feature as the record type, and use the map tools to draw a polygon around the inspection area.
Select to ‘Include in search’ and give the area an easy search term, such as ‘Zone1, Zone2, Zone3 etc.
Now you can search for Cases ‘within:Zone1’, bulk select and assign them to the same Field Officer.
These search areas will appear in the search area menu as well (the next time you log in or reload the site details)

NOTE: It is important to do a sanity check to make sure all inspections have been covered by all of your inspection zones, in case there is a gap in your geospatial areas! You can do advanced searches to find records NOT in areas or that don't have certain tags.

More on working with Geospatial Features

Work on mobile devices

Use the Crisisworks App on any mobile device to conduct Secondary Impact Assessments in the field. Follow these steps to set up your device:

Log into Crisisworks on the App using your own user profile
Save records locally on your device:
- Navigate to your Case records
- Tap 'Select all' at the top of the screen, then 'Add to offline store' and follow the prompts. Note: Selecting all chooses only the current page (25 records by default). To select more, scroll down and set items per page to 100 to add 100 records at a time.

This will allow the device to be used in ‘offline’ mode in low network coverage areas.

NOTE: If network coverage is weak, put the app in offline mode otherwise it will still try to use the weak internet connection.

SIA for private property assets

Property Damage: In the Property Damage section of the Case record, an Affected Private Asset must be created for each of the impacted assets, such as dwellings, sheds, vehicles, caravans, fencing, and equipment. There are various categories and subcategories available to capture most items. Where applicable, these items map to fields in the EM Impact Portal. but your Crisisworks system administrator can modify these dropdown lists to suit your needs.

SIA for single incidents (non-major emergencies)

Non-major emergencies, like house fires, can also be recorded and managed using Recovery Cases. A new Event can be created for each incident, or, they could be managed in a single Event created for each calendar year, such as ‘Single Incidents - 2025’ (this approach is quicker as the event already exists).

Either way, to record the impacted property:

create a Case record for the property
tick Damage has been confirmed
add Affected Private Assets
add Environmental Health Assessment
set the status of the record to Inspection Required and assign the Case to the officer who will be attending, eg the Municipal Building Surveyor (MBS) or the Environmental Health Officer (EHO).
The MBS will then complete information from attending the scene and set the Status back to Review.

Top Tip! Single incidents or non-major emergencies offer an excellent opportunity to practice using Crisisworks without the added stress of a large activation. This allows your emergency team to familiarise themselves with the process.

Ensure to include any Requests for council services, and record incident reports as Information entries.
Manage the affected property through the Recovery Case, recording a comprehensive Impact Assessment.
Add any required assistance as a Need & Task, assign them accordingly, and follow up with the officers involved to ensure they are set up correctly to receive assignment notifications.
Encourage all officers involved to input their contributions and responses directly into Crisisworks.

SIA for Council Infrastructure

Create a New Infrastructure Assessment to do a SIA for damage to roads, bridges, culverts or any council assets.

Create a New Infrastructure Assessment
If your Council Assets have been imported into Crisisworks, you will be able to search for the asset in the Address field.
If the assets are not imported, leave the address field blank, and instead place a map pin (📍) on the map to indicate the location of the damaged Asset and note the Asset ID or address of the impacted asset in the ‘Description of Damage’ field.
Add details of the Scope of Works and then add a Need & Task for each of the works required, including cost estimates.
Photos can be added to the record to document ‘pre-condition’, damage and progress of repairs.

Working with SIA data

Workflow

There are a number of options to choose from under Workflow>Status, apart from ‘New’, all the other statuses need to be selected manually by the User, the Case will not automatically transition from one to the next. This gives you some flexibility to adapt the Workflow to suit your specific work methods.

Typical usage is as follows:

New - transitioned from Relief Registrations or Assessments Register.
Open - Case is active
Review - a Case Officer has been assigned
Inspection Required - a Field Officer has been assigned and tasked to perform an inspection. When the inspection is complete, the status could be set back to Review.
No action required - for Cases where Damage to Private Assets was confirmed and all activity has concluded. This status will ensure the Record is included in EMV Impact Portal reporting.
Resolved - for Cases that did not require an SIA, when all activity has concluded
Closed - would be used after all final reviews have been conducted.

Each of the Case sub-registers have their own Workflow, for example the Environmental Health Assessment and the Needs & Tasks. These can be changed within the Case record or via the records in the subregister.

Top Tip! It’s important to note that any Cases with the Status of Resolved or Closed will be excluded from the numbers included in the EM Impact Portal report. These cases should instead be set to ‘No Action Required’.

Reporting SIA data

There are a number of reports available under Reports>Recovery. Another simple way to export data to a report, is to conduct a search from the Recovery Cases datagrid, select some of all of the records by ticking the box next to the record, then select ‘Export to Report' from the Actions menu.

Export data to EMV Recovery Portal (EM-Impact)

Victorian Council customers have access to the EMV Recovery Portal integration, which streamlines the submission of recovery data directly into the portal. The data used for the submission to the Portal is sourced from the Recovery Cases' Affected Private Assets and the Infrastructure assessments. The logic used for each metric is detailed in the Metric Specifications section on our Help page.

NOTE: The EM IMPACT report will exclude cases and infrastructure assessments that are Resolved or Closed, to include these, set their status to No Action Required