Emergency Management and GIS
Does your organization have a disaster management plan and, if so, does it include the use of GIS and geospatial data? Does your Business Continuity Plan include keeping an offline copy of the all the geographic data you might need in an emergency? Do you have all the agreements in place you will need to allow your organization to legally share data? Have you tried a simulation? If you have, what did you learn? Are you ready?
Haiti recently suffered a massive earthquake that destroyed infrastructure and left millions without water, food and shelter. In the wake of such a disaster, land data is no longer current or accurate: the roads and bridges are impassable; many buildings no longer exist, including power stations, pumping stations, hospitals and government operations centres. Most emergency response capability is severely reduced. This would be true regardless of how the information were stored or managed, because the information itself no longer reflects reality. From a GIS perspective, not only is the data now next to useless, there is no power or network to run the systems themselves. Is GIS really useful for Emergency Management?
Closer to home, in response to an August night filled with explosions and fires at a North York propane distribution centre, the Ontario government issued an Ontario Propane Safety Review Report (November 2008). Interestingly, recommendations 9 and 10 directly mention the use of GIS by municipal planning staff, specifically:
9. TSSA [Technical Standards & Safety Authority] should continue to invest in the technology needed to improve the quality and value of data on the location of propane facilities and those handling other volatile fuels, with a specific goal of allowing these facilities and related defined hazard distances to be mapped using geographical information system (GIS) technology.
10. TSSA should make available to municipalities and planning boards the locations of facilities and the defined hazard distance around each, either as maps or, if the community prefers, GIS data.
Subsequently, the Technical Standards & Safety Authority (TSSA) announced that it would make data available for GIS enabled municipalities. Although it is common for various committees, review boards and coroner’s inquests to make recommendations on how far to separate certain objects from neighbouring features, it is interesting that this particular report explicitly recommends the technology that should be used. Moreover, it implies that municipalities that actively use GIS can take advantage of this data.
It is certainly true that, given the buffer distance from a given object, GIS can be used to determine what lies within the area of greatest risk. It is then possible to impose land use restrictions (Zoning) that limit or prohibit land uses that could be negatively affected by the specific risk. However, it can be agued that a simple measurement using an old-fashioned scale and a school compass would be just as effective. Even if every barbeque propane cylinder exchange location was included, this manual approach would not take the average municipality more than a day to complete. Moreover, unless the data supplied by TSSA can be applied directly against a local municipality’s database, alignment would be so subject to doubt that the municipality would probably use only the locations and dimensions to recreate the mapping itself. So why suggest the use GIS?
The intent of the Ontario Propane Safety Review Report was to ensure that TSSA had a proper inventory of sites under its jurisdiction in a GIS environment that permitted modern, effective, and efficient asset management, risk assessment, and emergency response capability. The reference to municipal GIS, since it included no formal obligations, was for convenience and opportunities for cooperation. This is a good first step, but to be truly useful to manage disasters, requires additional coordination between more agencies: the municipal data and the agency’s data must be the same.
Disaster Management and Emergency Planning are essential and GIS plays a huge role in supporting them. It is a discipline that involves anticipating what might happen, responding during the crises, and rebuilding society after a disaster has occurred. From public to private sector, this involves horizontal and vertical data coordination among many aspects of a society.
However, many excellent emergency planners have no intention of using digital geospatial data during the emergency, regardless of how current the data is: they will use paper maps for general information and will build a picture of the reality outside from reports on the ground as they emerge. The biggest value of GIS is often the spatial models that are used long before there is a disaster at hand to determine disaster risk, extent and impact, and to play out the scenarios. Just like a sports team coach, this information can, in turn, be used to make what-if decisions that can be acted upon during the crisis. It is also true that not all disasters are total: with proper planning, a system could be able to update geographic information during a disaster (i.e. closed roads, damaged buildings, floods etc.), helping decision makers assign resources and contain situations.
As a GIS professional, have you actually thought through the issues that would affect you and your team during an emergency? Do you have access to the data you need to run simulations and have you and your emergency management professionals considered the simulations worth running? Have you considered how data can be quickly updated to reflect the changes wrought by the emergency? Have you really examined your business continuity proposals so that you know how your GIS would function without data or power. Perhaps now is the time to seriously consider less orthodox alternatives like cloud computing as your back-up?
In June 2010, Toronto will hold the annual World Conference on Disaster Management. As part of that conference, there will be a presentation on the lessons learned by the joint federal, provincial/state, county/region and municipal government team that simulated a terrorist attack at the Detroit/Windsor crossing, specifically some of the issues associated with the use of common geospatial Web Services. LIO was an active participant in this simulation exercise. GIS works, but not by magic: putting any multi-jurisdictional system in place requires cooperation, standards and data sharing before the emergency.
Using GIS in emergency management applications faces many of the same issues when incorporating GIS into any discipline, but the impact can be much more severe. The organizational culture required is still evolving and organizations are just beginning to recognize the benefit to their business of standardizing, sharing and collaborating to exchange data.
Are you ready, or are you putting off disaster planning until you finish that one more aspect to your soon-to-be-perfect GIS? Changing the organizational perspective will take time: start now or you will never get there.
Share your thoughts. Take care, and stay well…
Raphael Sussman
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