Seven Mapping Technology Applications for a Coordinated Emergency Response

A natural disaster can wreak havoc on communities, big and small.

When the wildfires engulfed Los Angeles and San Diego Counties, the nation watched in horror as a community known to entertain us now faced insurmountable odds. The death toll reached 30, while the economically hamstrung film community confronted seemingly habitual, inextricable existential threat. Despite these odds, heroic California firefighters took to the sky aboard tactical planes, tanker planes, and helicopters to isolate and surround a seemingly unquenchable, exponentially growing fire and overcome it.

When the floods hit a small stretch of land in the remote communities of Silver Gate and Cooke City, Montana, just a stone’s throw from Yellowstone National Park, the news coverage didn’t seem nearly as wide. But for my wife and me, it was all-consuming. We checked the message boards and local news stories, out of touch as cell service is notably absent in this community that once lodged Ernest Hemingway. Rescue efforts, like those in LA, seemed challenging and unprecedented, but thankfully were quite expertly carried out and successful – my mother-in-law among those in the community helicoptered to safety. 

Rescue efforts are nothing without the heroic champions that carry them out – and the various tools they expertly wield to do so. Therefore, in this article, I zoom out to showcase seven applications where mapping technology can, and has, been used to expertly coordinate an emergency response.

Real-Time Incident Mapping

There are several applications where real-time incident mapping has been seen fruitful in managing natural disasters as they unfold, as well as predicting future events.

Satellite technology has been specifically designed to detect wildfires across the globe and will be ramped up in the next five years alongside artificial intelligence leveraged to “sift through the satellites’ findings to uncover new patterns that could improve wildlife models.”

Additionally, Ersi has even recently integrated California live camera feeds into its ArcGIS platform to provide critical real-time information to emergency responders and improve awareness of wildfires and similar natural disasters.

Disaster Recovery and Damage Assessment 

GIS and remote sensing play a particularly interesting role in the assessment and risk management of natural disasters.

“The spatial interaction between the elements-at-risk and the hazard footprints are depicted in a GIS by simple map overlaying of the hazard map with the elements-at-risk map,” one study’s author denotes.

Studies have also looked at GIS applications in rapid disaster loss assessment for earthquakes, risk assessment for typhoon disasters, among others. Ersi’s ArcGIS platform has also notably introduced solutions for damage assessment.

Community Risk Assessment

A related concept within natural hazard management, risk management, particularly among disaster-prone areas, has been the center of comprehensive, systematic review for emergency preparedness.

The department of Homeland Security’s TechNote newsletter highlighted GIS and event model for disaster planning, with a few different examples showcased:

• GIS disaster event models to parse various data sources and build situational awareness and disaster planning– e.g.:
  • 3D data visualization (buildings, infrastructure, municipal facilities), 
  • 2D data (streets, roads, rivers, geographic maps) paired with aerial photography, population data, etc. 
• GIS flood models and population data, used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to estimate the affected land areas and visualize the most dangerous areas for Hurricane Isabel
• Pre-stored geographic map and population data integrated with plume models were used to indicate evacuation routes while avoiding downwind areas; additionally, fire departments like Baltimore F.D. used GIS to “optimize the deployment of limited emergency medical resources […] identifying population evacuation requirements and effectively [providing] fire and rescue services.”

Search and Rescue Operations

GIS, particularly personnel tracking, has proven useful for safety and personnel rescue, as seen in search and rescue operations in Norway; has improved spatial awareness in emergency response management in Seoul, South Korea; and has proven particularly useful in wilderness search and rescue operations, combining terrain analysis, behavioral profiling, probability theory, and resource management* to help optimize search efforts in remote areas like the challenging, personal tribulation I described at the outset of this article.

*e.g., emergency dispatch & routing – ambulance, fire trucks, and other emergency vehicles leverage GIS-based routing systems to help navigate roadblocks, traffic, disaster debris, etc., ensuring efficient use of resources.

Wildlife Management

It’s worth noting how biologists manage vulnerable wildlife ecosystems. The Yellowstone wolf project, kicking off in January of 1995, has spanned three decades, spearheaded by Senior Wildlife Biologist Doug Smith (chronicled by National Geographic), who recently retired. The project, to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone*, has been mapped historically.

*As another personal connection, my wife, a library and information scientist, recently leveraged available wolf tracking data to produce a helpful, more intuitive SQL database. Ask her about it on LinkedIn, if you’re interested.

Pandemic Response and Public Health Mapping

Bill Gates in 2015 predicted the next outbreak for which we’d be unprepared. Then, perhaps it was the winter of our discontent, December 2019, the first symptoms of COVID-19, presenting atypical, pneumonia-like, were first observed.

GIS, as Ersi has relayed, can help with pandemic response and public health mapping. The technology provides “public health modeling and mapping tools for surveillance and monitoring, [helping understand] resource capacity and needs, and [improves] critical communication,” with real-time mapping data helping slow the spread.

Real-time Radiation Exposure Detection and Emergency Response 

Frontline emergency responders have particularly challenging, stress-prone, high-stakes jobs – as they prepare for emergency situations, like indirect nuclear and radioactive events. Personal radiation detector technology breakthroughs have nonetheless led to innovations like sourceless training kits, which allow for realistic simulation of radiation or nuclear detection and response (e.g., contamination spread and mapping). They do this, importantly, while sparing users of the burden and associated hazards that come with being exposed to genuine radioactive sources.

Additionally, integrations of lidar with radiation survey meters have enabled users to map environments while collecting radiological data to then localize their data in a high-resolution 3D model of their asset.

A Coordinated Path Forward

GIS and other advanced mapping technologies play a critical role in the emergency responder’s toolkit for delivering safer, more efficient, and coordinated emergency services when seconds count. The above applications are just a smattering of use cases to provoke additional thought and push the industry forward.