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We work hand-in-hand with our clients to develop innovative solutions to address your complex challenges and help you get the most out of your technology investments.

States are carrying more of the emergency management mission.Next week's NEMA Annual Forum agenda keeps coming back to i...
10/16/2026

States are carrying more of the emergency management mission.

Next week's NEMA Annual Forum agenda keeps coming back to it.

✅ The AI for Disasters and Emergencies workshop opens with states taking on more responsibility.
✅ Wednesday's rural power panel plans for federal disaster support that may shrink or arrive less predictably.
✅ On Thursday, Pennsylvania's director walks through an executive order that spells out who owns what across the Commonwealth.

New responsibility rarely arrives with new staff or a bigger budget.

Most of it lands on the team and the systems a state already has.

That's the problem BES works on with state programs. We connect the plans, data, and tools an agency already owns, so the same team can cover more ground.

Kentucky Emergency Management is one example. KYEM supports 120 counties.

KYEM now runs one statewide operating picture across all 120, built on ArcGIS and Microsoft 365. The state already owned both.

On Monday, Samantha Phillips and Ron Prater head to Little Rock for the National Emergency Management Association (NEMA) Annual Forum at the Statehouse Convention Center.

Samantha is our Executive Director of Mission Delivery. Before BES, she led the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

Ron, our COO and Co-Founder, was at last month's AIDE Summit working through a related question: what AI should do inside an EOC, and where it should stop.

If your state is figuring out how to carry more with what it already has, find Samantha or Ron in Little Rock.

Or send either of them a message before Monday, and they'll set aside time to talk.

🎉 We're excited to welcome Savannah Walker to the BES team!Savannah joins us as a Geospatial Analyst with a B.S. in Geog...
10/07/2026

🎉 We're excited to welcome Savannah Walker to the BES team!

Savannah joins us as a Geospatial Analyst with a B.S. in Geography (Applied GIS), minors in Computer Science and Climate Science from James Madison University, and a USGIF certificate.

Her toolkit runs from ArcGIS Pro and Google Earth Engine to GPS field collection, built across research, government, nonprofit, and education projects. Image classification, geocoding, decision-support maps: the work that turns raw spatial data into something a decision-maker can act on.

Outside the office, Savannah likes to keep things cozy by cooking, baking, reading a good book, and a houseplant collection that keeps growing (in more ways than one). She is also always up for a board game or a crafting session.

Welcome to BES, Savannah!

🔗 See the roles we're hiring for: bit.ly/412Er7o

Most wildfire decisions get made before anyone sees smoke.Hours earlier, a team is watching the wind and how dry the veg...
10/05/2026

Most wildfire decisions get made before anyone sees smoke.

Hours earlier, a team is watching the wind and how dry the vegetation has become.

They're deciding whether to stage crews, alert a community, or shut off power to a circuit before conditions turn.

Those calls come from a room full of expertise. Meteorologists run the forecasts and watch live station readings. Fire behavior specialists assess the fuels and terrain. Operations knows which circuits to switch off and how to keep the shutoff small. Outside the room, emergency managers need to know who loses power and who depends on it.

The hard part is pulling all of that into one risk picture, down to the circuit, while conditions are still changing.

And the decision has to hold up later, when regulators and the public ask why it was made.

That's the focus of our free webinar on Wednesday, October 14:

"Assessing Wildfire Risk Before It Escalates: Lessons from the Fire Line and the Sensor Network"

Russ Johnson, BES Co-Founder, spent 32 years as a Chief Fire Management Officer with the U.S. Forest Service.

Chris Arends of Western Weather Group is a former Navy meteorologist who built one of the first utility wildfire weather networks in the country.

In one hour, they'll walk through:

✅ The early warning signs experienced fire managers watch for, and how station data confirms or challenges them
✅ Why the location and calibration of a weather reading matter when a decision gets reviewed months later
✅ How to put live weather observations on the same map as your assets, crews, and high-risk areas

This session is built for utility wildfire mitigation and operations teams, and for the emergency managers who work alongside them.

🗓️ Wed, Oct 14 | 2–3 PM ET | Microsoft Teams
🔗 Register: https://bit.ly/3VbXCvt

Two years ago this August, Emily Paglicci joined BES as an Intelligence Analyst. This August, she stepped into the Senio...
09/29/2026

Two years ago this August, Emily Paglicci joined BES as an Intelligence Analyst. This August, she stepped into the Senior Intelligence Analyst role.

That timeline says what the title can't. Two years of steady, careful work on the intelligence team, producing reporting that decision-makers could act on, and earning the trust that comes with it.

Senior Intelligence Analyst recognizes what her colleagues already knew. Emily is someone the team truly relies on.

We're grateful for the consistency and care Emily Paglicci brings to BES every day.

Congratulations, Emily!

🎉 Dylan Mantovani joins BES as a GIS Analyst!Dylan comes to us from William & Mary, where he majored in Government with ...
09/29/2026

🎉 Dylan Mantovani joins BES as a GIS Analyst!

Dylan comes to us from William & Mary, where he majored in Government with a minor in Geospatial Analysis.

His research there focused on geopolitical tension across Southern and Southeast Asia and how it shapes great power politics. Where the political meets the spatial is where Dylan wants to keep working, and it is where many of our clients' hardest questions live.

Outside the office, Dylan explores the museums of D.C. and is working through a long list of new places to visit. Ask him what's next on it.

Welcome to BES, Dylan!

🔗 See the roles we're hiring for: bit.ly/412Er7o

BES is partnering with Western Weather Group to put field-verified weather data in decision-makers' hands, in the best f...
09/28/2026

BES is partnering with Western Weather Group to put field-verified weather data in decision-makers' hands, in the best format for their operations.

When a utility is weighing a shutoff, weather always plays a critical role. Too often, it sits in a separate tool and is disparate from the rest of the system.

WWG deploys and maintains more than 8,000 weather stations and 25,000 sensors across North America. Each one is calibrated and field-validated.

BES connects those feeds to the Esri dashboards and incident tools utilities and emergency managers already run.

No new platform required. As CEO Chris McIntosh Puts it:

"When a utility is weighing a de-energization call, the weather has to be on the same screen as the circuits, the crews, high hazard wildfire areas and customers. We can now put WWG's highly accurate, location-based observations into the common operating pictures utilities already use."

Wildfire risk now reaches well beyond the West. Utilities across the country are being asked to show the data behind their shutoff decisions, and this partnership is built to answer that question.

On October 14 at 2 PM ET, BES's Russ Johnson and WWG's Chris Arends will go deeper in a free webinar. Russ spent 32 years as a Chief Fire Management Officer with the U.S. Forest Service. Chris is a former Navy meteorologist who built one of the first utility wildfire weather networks in the country.

➡️ Register for the webinar: https://bit.ly/3VxPipP
🔗 Read the full announcement: https://bit.ly/4AveH3F

Saturday's nor'easter hit the coast with near-hurricane winds. By Sunday, more than 80,000 customers across the Northeas...
09/28/2026

Saturday's nor'easter hit the coast with near-hurricane winds. By Sunday, more than 80,000 customers across the Northeast were without power.

That's the headline number, but that isn't the only one a public safety leader needs.

The more important question is what is impacted.

The dashboard below was captured Saturday night. It showed 28 fire stations inside active outages. 34 schools. 10 cell towers. A hospital. Roughly 660,000 residents living inside the affected areas.

Public trackers can't tell you any of that. They report totals by county or by utility, which confirms the storm is big and not much else.

This dashboard runs on power outage data from Ting Insights, drawn from the nation's largest electrical safety network. Outages arrive in ArcGIS as neighborhood-level polygons, refreshed every five minutes or less. Layer your own facilities on top, and the count of what's dark updates while the storm is still moving.

Same storm. Better data-driven decision-making.

🔗 See how it works and book a walkthrough with your team: https://bit.ly/4owGavB

📢 BES is hiring a Senior GIS Analyst to design and build GIS solutions for public safety and emergency management client...
09/23/2026

📢 BES is hiring a Senior GIS Analyst to design and build GIS solutions for public safety and emergency management clients. Applicants will work alongside developers, consultants, analysts, and project managers, owning projects from requirements through delivery.

What the work looks like:

✅ Turning a client conversation into an Experience Builder app, a Dashboard, or a Survey123 form they open every day
✅ Building and maintaining data in ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro, with data integrity as the standard
✅ Writing documentation and SOPs that hold up after you hand them off
✅ Advising clients on GIS policy and operational strategy

What we are looking for:

✅ 5+ years in GIS; geospatial intelligence experience preferred
✅ Deep experience across the Esri platform: ArcGIS Online, Portal, Experience Builder, Dashboard, Hub, Map Viewer
✅ An IT-level understanding of how ArcGIS runs: servers, databases, security, cloud
✅ Clear writing. You will explain findings to people who do not speak GIS.
✅ Ability to obtain a Top Secret clearance, based in the Washington, DC area

Python and JavaScript are a plus. Curiosity and a willingness to take on exciting new work at a growing company are required.

Salary range: $85,000 to $120,000, with professional development and training built in.

Know someone who fits? Send this their way or share it with your network.

🔗 Apply today: https://bit.ly/40Z1wYB

Nobody on that stage thinks emergency management is getting smaller.Last Wednesday at the NYS DHSES Disaster Preparednes...
09/22/2026

Nobody on that stage thinks emergency management is getting smaller.

Last Wednesday at the NYS DHSES Disaster Preparedness Commission Conference, Deanne Criswell and Samantha Phillips took the "Ahead of the Change" panel, moderated by Greg Brunelle. Between them: a federal agency, two state agencies, and two of the largest city programs in the country.

The topic was a profession that keeps absorbing ever-increasing responsibility while its budget keeps tightening. Sheltering. Resettlement. Climate resilience. Cyber preparedness. Each one landed on an office already stretched thin.

The real cost isn't the new work. It's what the new work pulls away from the original mission of readiness, response, and recovery.

Three questions the panel left with the room:

Which of these missions are ours to keep?
What are we giving up to carry them?
What does this program need to look like in five years?

Thanks to NYS DHSES for hosting. If your program is being asked to do more than it was built for, we'd like to hear how you're handling it.

"What if?" is the question Reson Holloway spends her workdays on, so the people she supports never have to ask "what now...
09/21/2026

"What if?" is the question Reson Holloway spends her workdays on, so the people she supports never have to ask "what now?"

Reson is an Emergency Management Consultant at BES and currently supports Dominion Energy Virginia's Electric Transmission Emergency Preparedness Team. She came to us from local government emergency management, so her work covers the full cycle: preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation.

In practice, that means strengthening plans, building relationships with response partners, and finding capability gaps while there's still time to close them.

Thank you for everything you do, Reson!

🔗 Read more about Reson's impact at BES: https://bit.ly/45AA9Fh

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1530 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 650
Alexandria, VA
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