When disaster strikes – whether caused by human hands or by nature – emergency responders on the scene must quickly locate people in the immediate area, identify and treat the injured, locate the missing, and arrange lodging and care for those whose homes have been damaged or destroyed.

Under the pressure of the moment, performing these tasks can be difficult when the damage spans a wide area and hundreds of volunteers are on the scene. How can this crucial task be managed effectively?

The complexity of managing such a situation was brought into focus on Sunday, March 1, when a ballistic missile launched from Iran struck a Beit Shemesh neighborhood, killing nine people, wounding dozens, and causing extensive damage. There was widespread chaos at the scene as emergency personnel worked frantically to locate residents who were wounded or missing. First responders lacked an accurate list of area residents, which delayed their rescue efforts. 

Reuven Harow, Magen David Adom volunteer, senior medic, and Beit Shemesh regional volunteer coordinator for MDA, who assisted in the rescue efforts in Beit Shemesh, says, “In the immediate aftermath of a mass-casualty event – such as the one Beit Shemesh experienced on March 1 – there is a tremendous level of uncertainty. Home Front Command must quickly determine whether individuals are missing, deceased, hospitalized without identification, or unharmed and simply outside the affected area.

“At the same time, all those present in the area must be accounted for. The more information that can be gathered in real time, the more effectively and swiftly authorities can locate the missing, while avoiding the costly diversion of resources toward those who are not.”

United Hatzalah spokesman Simmy Allen adds, “The use of technology is extremely useful in the field of emergency first response. We saw in places like Beit Shemesh, Dimona, and Ramat Gan how knowing where people are in these disaster sites can be the difference between life and disaster.”

SHMUEL FITOUSSI, chief information officer (CIO) of the Efrat Municipality, believes he has devised a solution that can help emergency workers enter, compile, and organize data at emergency sites, thereby simplifying and streamlining the process and saving lives.

Though Fitoussi is not a member of the emergency rescue team in Efrat, as the municipality’s computer expert his advice is often sought on how technology can help solve issues.

The day after the Beit Shemesh tragedy, the Efrat Municipality held a home front training exercise that focused on the work of emergency responders in the wake of a missile attack.

“When the drill was reviewed,” Fitoussi says, “it turned out that it was difficult to distinguish between those who were ‘wounded’ or ‘killed’ in the exercise.” The simulation revealed a lack of organization and order. In addition, volunteers were unable to create a joint reporting sheet in real time because the Google Sheets program slowed under the load of numerous simultaneous data entries and eventually crashed.

Fitoussi decided to address both issues by creating a database that could handle multiple users simultaneously and manage the specific details volunteers would input. He worked feverishly over three days to create the program, with the less than catchy name “Management of Residents and Buildings in Emergencies” (Hebrew: Nihul Toshavim Umivnim B’Herum).

The program, which runs on mobile devices, tablets, and desktop computers, enables emergency personnel and social service workers to input precise, detailed information about individuals who were present at the scene, from the color of their hair, details about their attire, and, of course, if they were wounded, missing, or deceased.

“If a child comes in looking for their father and can identify specific details,” he adds, “these details are input into the program. Then we cross-check the data, and everyone adds all of their specific details.”

At its core, the platform links individual residents to specific locations, allowing responders to quickly determine each person’s status – such as safe, injured, missing, or evacuated – and display key personal details, including contact information and demographic data. A visual dashboard presents this information in real time, using clear color-coded indicators and summaries to help decision-makers immediately understand the scope of the event.

By replacing fragmented information and manual tracking with a unified, real-time system, the platform reduces chaos, minimizes duplication of effort, and significantly improves the speed and accuracy of emergency response – ultimately helping to save lives.

Volunteers can record whether the person they found is healthy, wounded, trapped in the wreckage, or sent to the hospital. When additional information emerges from the police, fire department, and rescue organizations, they add that information until they gradually build a profile of the individuals who were present. In this manner, the program creates a constantly evolving, centralized picture of the situation.

Fitoussi built a complementary database that enabled engineers to assess and record the status of buildings in the disaster zone – indicating whether they were fully habitable, partially habitable, or unfit for occupancy. Buildings can also be flagged for hazards such as structural damage, utility failures, or other risks. The engineers added specific details about all the structures in Efrat, including construction materials. Fitoussi then took all the addresses in Efrat and added their x and y coordinates to make them locatable, so rescue teams could easily find the locations.

By storing the status of the damaged buildings, emergency personnel will know immediately if residents are eligible for temporary lodging. Fitoussi added another component to the program: a fully searchable database of ID numbers (teudot zehut), addresses, and names of Efrat residents.

Using the program, emergency personnel can search by ID number, enter specific details about people at the event site, and quickly build profiles of residents, enabling faster identification of those who are missing or wounded.

Fitoussi says the data for Efrat – updated every three months – also includes residents’ health fund information, and organizes student data by grade level (year). All information is digitally secured within the program and deleted after the security event ends.

Summarizing what the program does, he says, “We’re working to have everything prepared so that in an emergency, we won’t need to scramble to find information about individuals.”

DOVI SHEFLER, head of the Efrat Municipality, says Fitoussi’s app is particularly significant under the current circumstances.

“This is an exceptional initiative that was born out of the real needs on the ground. In a reality where any local authority may find itself dealing with a complex emergency, such a system can make the difference between confusion and effective management that saves lives. We are proud that this development was carried out here in Efrat, and we would be very pleased to see this system reach every city and community in Israel, helping authorities better cope with emergencies.”

Fitoussi is offering the program to other local municipalities, and he says that a number have expressed interest in obtaining it for their towns to use with their existing data.

While the distinctive feature of Fitoussi’s program is its ability to enter data in real time, integrated with data about the residents, he expresses frustration that no national program currently does so.

“I think that the work I did is good, but it is a bit superfluous because the government should have provided it. I am solving a problem that the government is not solving for me.” Fitoussi adds that if the government provided the data, the program would have information on whether certain residents were out of the country and were not suspected of being missing in the accident. “If I could connect to government data, my program would be even more reliable and far simpler. I cannot understand how we are called the Start-Up Nation and still can’t do this.”

Fitoussi has always been a self-taught computer tinkerer, and his interest in computers and technology dates back to his childhood in Paris. “When we lived in France in the 1980s,” he says, “my father purchased one of the early PCs, and I erased it three times. From these experiences, I learned how to use computers.”

His family was one of the few families that owned a computer at the time, he says, and his father, who served as the assistant principal of the Yavneh school in Paris, enlisted him to produce the school newspaper. Hebrew fonts didn’t exist at the time, he recalls, so his father wrote a program to create them, and the young Fitoussi designed the fonts, drawing them pixel by pixel.

When he made aliyah in 1996 at the age of 15 – his parents and siblings came the following year – Fitoussi gained further expertise by installing Windows 95 and later Windows 98 system software on computers. 

The 45-year-old Fitoussi, who lives in Karmei Tzur with his wife and six children, has served as the chief information officer in Efrat for the past 20 years. He spends most of his days maintaining computer technology in the city, repairing computers, connecting networks, establishing Wi-Fi networks in schools, providing data security, and teaching classes in AI, Excel, and Word.

Fitoussi credits the Efrat Municipality for encouraging him to think creatively and supporting his efforts to develop his disaster management program, one he hopes will never be needed. Should the need arise, he trusts that Efrat, as well as other municipalities that will use the program, will be fully prepared.