Cities and Counties Homeland Strengthen Security with Geographic Information Systems

At 7:30 on a Tuesday morning, a bomb blast rips through a government building in the center of Grand Forks, N.D., sending glass flying for blocks, rupturing gas lines, and killing or injuring scores of people.

Police and fire personnel en route to the disaster use notebook computers to access the city’s geographic information system (GIS), which displays an aerial map of the city. First responders zoom in on the government building and calculate the bomb’s lethal blast area and falling glass radius within seconds.

A mouse click on the building shows floor plans, the number of employees likely to be present in the building and any hazardous materials. First responders also gather information on underground gas and utility lines in the area by clicking on manhole covers near the disaster.

This is a horrible, fictitious scenario that Grand Forks’ GIS/CAD Coordinator Adam Jonasson plays over and over again in his mind. But the technology is real, and it’s just one of many GIS enhancements that state and local governments are incorporating into their homeland security programs.

“It’s the type of system that you’re glad if you don’t have to use it,” Jonasson says. But there is a positive side. Grand Forks is standardizing its emergency response systems so they also can be used for natural disasters.

“Many people recognize that [GIS] is an important piece of their emergency preparedness plans,” explains Alan Shark, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Public Technology Institute, a nonprofit technology-oriented organization representing local governments.

The threat isn’t always from terrorists, Shark adds, pointing out that governments may have to face natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes or tsunamis. “Mapping is critical to realize what’s going on and to convey that to the general public,” he explains.

“Governments now realize the impact geospatial data sharing has,” Shark says. “It cuts across all areas of services (public safety, health and social services) and levels of government (federal, state, local and regional) in helping officials make more informed decisions.”

Enhancing Crisis Planning

During the last two decades, Grand Forks has relied on GIS mapping technology from Autodesk to effectively manage the city’s infrastructure. In the last five years, Jonasson’s team has added technology that links those maps to city databases.

City crews will soon use wireless notebook computers to retrieve work orders and maintenance information by clicking on a GIS map. “It’s growing into somewhat of a dashboard for our internal use by field workers,” Jonasson says.

Grand Forks’ newest GIS software addition, Autodesk’s Crisis Command, adds critical information that first responders need in a security emergency, and it standardizes police and fire information. Crisis Command’s tools can quickly calculate the effects of a bomb blast, fire or chemical spill and then map the results to scale. If a sniper were to terrorize the city, the software could calculate the sniper’s line of sight.

However, Jonasson says the real power of GIS is the ability to start with a 20-square-mile city view and zoom into one building. A mouse click on the building reveals floor plans, heating and ventilation systems, gas and electric shutoff locations, any stored hazardous materials, Internet Protocol addresses to surveillance cameras and contact information. This provides answers to “all the important questions first responders would ask if they were responding to an incident,” he points out.

To acquire such granular details, police and fire personnel must “preplan” each building by visiting the facility, gathering the information and inputting it into the database. Police and fire squads have been preplanning buildings in Grand Forks for years. “The difference is that more detailed data is now available in the field when an emergency arises,” Jonasson says.

More than nine months into its implementation, Grand Forks has preplanned 30 buildings that it considers most vulnerable, with plans to add details for up to 120 more structures this summer.

Grand Forks faces other challenges. Its 35 police squad cars carried older notebook computers that couldn’t run the Crisis Command software. The notebooks were updated earlier this year, but the new software hadn’t been downloaded as of May.

“Right now, [the notebooks are] being used more as a tool in the office,” Jonasson says. “Captains and battalion chiefs are using [them] to get in their preplans. Full implementation for the fire and police departments will happen over the summer. All have been trained, but the need for follow-up training exists.”

Grand Forks’ fire department plans to make Crisis Command its primary software for fire response. Today, the department uses different software packages in the office and in the field. The fire department wants to standardize on one software program so “firefighters can be trained on it when they come in,” Jonasson says.

Shared Responsibility

North Dakota may not be an obvious spot for a terrorist attack, but the counties surrounding Washington, D.C., are. In Fairfax County, Va., which covers 395 square miles just west of the district and includes a population of more than 1 million people, emergency response is a shared responsibility between federal and state governments.

“Since Sept. 11, the county has significantly enhanced its emergency response and operation capacity and capabilities,” says Tom Conry, GIS and mapping branch manager for Fairfax County. Last year, Fairfax County opened a new alternate emergency operations center (AEOC) that includes use of the county’s existing GIS technology. Fairfax County’s GIS system includes ESRI mapping software with database information stored in an Oracle enterprise server using Oracle Spatial, which manages location information data. The AEOC taps the enterprise GIS data warehouse, which uses more than two terabytes of space on the county’s storage area network.

The county’s emergency management office “realized that whenever the AEOC is in operation—either in a test mode or actual response— it needs full-fledged GIS capabilities in that center,” Conry says. So, GIS staff members are on call to staff the center when an emergency arises.

At the same time, Conry’s staff has started augmenting key data on the county’s infrastructure. GIS data is updated daily and is immediately available for emergency operations. Fairfax County will soon add WebEOC software from Emergency Services Integrators, a Web-based emergency management communications system that makes incident information—including GIS—readily available via the Web. Virginia plans to standardize all county and local agencies on WebEOC software.

Conry chaired Fairfax County’s Emergency Management Coordinating Committee’s GIS Subcommittee, which documents the needs of county agencies for GIS technology in emergency management. That subcommittee proposed a list of 10 enhancements to GIS systems that could improve security. Most have been implemented or are in the process of being implemented.

For starters, Conry would like to add daytime population data to the GIS database. “A lot of these incidents happen in the day,” he points out.

Like other counties, Fairfax also must deal with local utility companies about access to their sensitive data. “Some of them won’t [share] because they’re concerned about the security of their data,” such as transformer locations and critical switching areas, Conry says. “But it’s important for the county to know where some of those things are in terms of responding.”

Conry stresses that GIS information should be used, enhanced and shared on a daily basis to ensure that county government personnel are well-versed in its capabilities. “GIS is not an add-on to emergency response,” he explains. “If used day to day, it becomes embedded in your process and becomes a core asset for operation and emergency response.”

Homeland Security Efforts

In nearby Prince William County, Va., the GIS division knows firsthand the benefits of GIS technology for homeland security efforts. At a regional exercise in March at the Quantico Marine Corps Base, Prince William County activated its emergency operations center for a train derailment scenario involving a chlorine gas spill.

“Our GIS staff ran plume modeling based on wind direction to determine the impacted area,” says Kathy Prescott, GIS division chief. The team received digital photos from the field and sent digital maps to the field using ESRI’s ArcGIS software.

Five Northern Virginia counties use similar GIS technology, enabling them to share information via a Web service. “We have the same standards for our street center lines, which is useful,” Prescott explains. “For emergency response, we have the capability to set up a service that would allow Prince William and Loudoun Counties to go seamlessly between the two jurisdictions.”

Several government organizations, coordinating through the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, have stepped in to expand information sharing beyond Virginia into Maryland and Washington, D.C. Collaboration is still in the early stages. However, if Prince William County should need to share its geospatial data with Grand Forks, N.D., the city’s Autodesk system could accept and read ESRI data, as well as information from any other type of GIS system.

“In this day and time, we need total interoperability with fire departments, law enforcement, EMS [Emergency Medical Services], emergency management and hospitals,” points out Jon Hansen, manager for emergency response solutions at Autodesk and a retired assistant chief at the Oklahoma City Fire Department. “It takes that entire response team to handle a catastrophic situation.”