ESRI

GIS for Public Safety

Protecting citizens, property, and the environment are among the most important responsibilities of government agencies. Public safety agencies are the front line of defense for keeping the public and communities safe.

Both natural and man-made disasters cost billions of dollars annually. Businesses suffer from lost assets and productivity. Local, state, and national governments must clean up and repair damaged infrastructures. Nongovernmental organizations must put aside their primary missions to help rebuild communities.

The threat from disasters is growing worldwide. Forty of the 50 fastest growing cities in the world are located in earthquake zones. Some 10 million people in developing countries live under constant threat of floods. One billion people are highly vulnerable to disasters ranging from earthquakes to mud slides. Recovery from these tragic events can take years.
Reducing the loss of life and property from natural and human caused emergencies requires planning and preparedness that is closely tied to geographic information. Good planning begins by understanding where emergency events could occur, where community vulnerabilities exist, and where citizen safety is at risk. Once these locations are identified, government agencies can formulate prevention and mitigation requirements, response needs, and emergency preparedness requirements.

Fire departments are responsible for protecting lives and property, but they have limited resources. Consequently, it is critical that resources are deployed effectively and efficiently. Optimal deployment is influenced by factors such as fire demand, effective fire fighting force size, type of occupancy, historical occurrence of fires, and response time.

Traditional planning methods require numerous maps, reports, tables, and historical records that are often maintained in different locations and formats. Assembling these data sources and translating them into a useful format requires time and effort.

When complete, the resulting deployment plans are often implemented and then shelved. With GIS, fire plans can be continuously monitored, updated, and adjusted. GIS transforms fire planning from a static document to an ongoing dynamic process.

Keeping firefighters safe is a critical objective for all fire departments. GIS provides the tools to work with tactical, location-based information such as floor plans, utility control points, prefire plans, hazardous material contents and locations, surrounding exposures, aerial imagery, and hydrant locations. Access to this information while en route or on scene allows firefighters to deploy more quickly, effectively, and, most important, safely.

GIS for Disaster & EM

Emergency management professionals are responsible for assessing risks and hazards and identifying potential emergencies and disasters. Emergency operations personnel recommend appropriate prevention or mitigation strategies that can reduce the impact of potential emergencies. Large, complex emergencies often affect multiple departments or multiple agencies and require data to be collected and assembled from a variety of locations quickly under adverse conditions. Part of the Emergency Operations Center’s role is understanding the details of the emergency, ordering the required response resources, coordinating with adjoining agencies (federal, state, and local), and determining the immediate actions necessary to contain the incident.
Manage disasters and emergencies with GIS by

• Assessing the locations of risks and hazards in relation to populations, property, and natural resources
• Integrating data and understanding the scope of an emergency to manage an incident
• Recommending preventive and mitigating solutions
• Determining how and where scarce resources should be assigned
• Prioritizing for search and rescue tasks
• Identifying staging area locations, operational branches and divisions, and other important incident management needs
• Assessing the short- and long-term recovery operations

GIS for Homeland Security

Homeland security is focused on three primary objectives. These objectives are protecting life, property, and critical infrastructure. Homeland security efforts require a multitude of critical tasks that incorporate both short- and long-range planning including risk assessment, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Technology and information are crucial in these efforts.

All emergencies, whether caused by nature or people, begin locally and elevate to regional, state, or national levels depending on severity, complexity, size, and nature of the event. During these events, emergency managers need the right information at the right time to deploy resources, implement evacuation plans, establish medical aid, and manage events as they unfold.

GIS is the core information and analysis tool that helps manage geographic-based and associated data. GIS has been embraced by professionals in all areas of government and business for conducting day-to-day operations as well as for planning, analysis, and decision-making.

GIS can be used to develop a community’s emergency response plan by identifying the location of schools, medical centers, staging areas, and evacuation routes. Analysis can identify transportation choke points near bridges or overpasses. During an emergency, GIS can be used to route response vehicles and quickly identify critical infrastructures such as water storage/treatment facilities, communications networks, electric generation facilities, refineries, and more.

The creation of an enterprise homeland security GIS database enables emergency managers to

• Assess risks to community and infrastructure.
• Establish specific mitigation/protection plans.
• Determine the scale of the emergency.
• Estimate rate of spread or progression.
• Identify and evacuate at-risk populations.
• Expedite and direct rescue efforts.
• Provide accurate damage assessment.
• Prioritize recovery efforts.

ESRI Products

ArcGIS is a scalable family of software comprising a complete geographic information system, built on industry standards, that is rich in functionality and works out of the box. Organizations deploy the software of ArcGIS— ArcView, ArcEditor, ArcInfo, ArcSDE, and ArcIMS— in a configuration appropriate for their needs.

ArcView is the world's most popular desktop GIS and mapping software, with more than 500,000 copies in use worldwide. ArcView provides geographic data visualization, query, analysis, and integration capabilities along with the ability to create and edit geographic data.

ArcEditoris a state-of-the-art GIS data visualization, query, and creation solution. Designed for the Windows desktop, ArcEditor is the ideal solution for managing and editing shapefiles, personal geodatabases, and multi-user (ArcSDE) geodatabases.

ArcInfo is the complete GIS data creation, update, query, mapping, and analysis system. Professionals use ArcInfo for spatial data automation since it includes the most comprehensive collection of GIS tools available.

ArcSDE is an application server that facilitates storing and managing spatial data in a relational database management system. ArcSDE allows you to openly manage spatial data in one of four commercial databases (IBM DB2 Universal Database and Informix Dynamic Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle) and to serve ESRI's file-based data. ArcIMS software is the foundation for distributing geographic information system (GIS) data and applications on the Internet. ArcIMS provides a standard platform to integrate, share, and exchange GIS data from other agencies. ArcIMS supports Windows, UNIX, and Linux platforms.

For more information on these and other ESRI products, please visit ESRI online at http://www.esri.com/software/index.html

About ESRI

With annual sales of more than $469 million, ESRI has been the world leader in the geographic information system (GIS) software industry for more than 30 years. Additionally, ESRI provides powerful GIS solutions to more than 300,000 clients in more than 220 countries. Headquartered in Redlands, California, ESRI has regional offices throughout the United States, several subsidiary companies overseas, and more than 1,500 industry leaders and business partners who work with ESRI to provide software, data, and hardware that complement ESRI's suite of GIS software. Working with location information, ESRI's GIS software and solutions give you the power to solve problems you encounter every day. Organizations around the world, as well as local, state, and federal government agencies, are using ESRI GIS software to make smart and timely decisions.

As the leader in GIS technology, ESRI offers innovative solutions that will help you create, visualize, analyze, and present information better and more clearly. ESRI software is built on standard and open information technology and has been designed to operate with all-relational database management systems. ESRI's software is developed with open (nonproprietary) development tools, and our software is built on new, modern, object-component software standards (COM) that are easily customized and embedded for a wide range of application needs. ESRI's comprehensive product line ranges from desktop GIS to GIS for the enterprise--and our Internet software revolutionizes the way users can access and interact with Internet mapping and GIS data at the desktop, thereby making the promise of distributed GIS a reality that is easy to accomplish.

ESRI will continue to lead the world in providing mapping technology that meets the needs of today's competitive market. Look to ESRI for GIS solutions to help unlock the spatial component of your valuable data and see your organization's information from a new perspective.