http://web.uccs.edu/geogenvs/work/Eve/Beyond%20Flood%20Detection%20Final.html>.
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assessment center, based on plans developed from the lessons of
the Three Mile Island accident. Guber emphasized how important it
is that all people responding to an emergency have access to the
best information as quickly as possible. The centers can be set up
in offices or field tents and have their own backup power.
Computing is pervasive, and there are large video monitors to
provide situational awareness. Drills are conducted to test
equipment and, particularly, inter- and intra-agency communication.
Drills strengthen links between participating agencies, data sets,
and individuals and are essential if emergency management is to be
effective.
Major challenges in responding to nuclear emergencies include
the difficulty of tracing the threat (using sophisticated sensors);
the labor-intensive, slow nature of field assessment; and the
difficulty of interpreting measured radiation values for both the
general public and decision makers. Information technology
capabilities—including support for advance warnings; modeling
for evacuations; real-time GPS; field database entry and a tracking
system to integrate field, laboratory, and analysis units; and
advanced graphics for decision support—can help to improve the
response to nuclear emergencies.
Fires
Large-scale fires capable of inflicting significant loss of
life, property, and environmental resources are a serious disaster
force worldwide. Population pressures increase the risk of
catastrophic fires. People are moving into areas of known high fire
hazard. In addition, fires are prevented from spreading through
their normal course, creating a more serious threat in the future.
A critical feature of fires is the need for total extinction of the
threat ("put the fire out, dead out"). Many large fires, such as
the 1991 fire in the hills of Oakland, California, that burned more
than 2,000 structures worth $1.6 billion and killed 25 people, are
flare-ups of small fires thought to have been put out. This factor
greatly increases the cost of eliminating the threat. Once a fire
starts, all possible hot spots must be put out completely. For this
reason, 2,000 to 3,000 firefighters, at a cost of up to $2 million
a day, may be needed to fight a large fire.
Fires have caused billions of dollars in damage to property and
serious loss of life. They consume millions of acres every year,
many of them in critical watershed areas throughout the world.
Ecosystems in many areas of the world are dependent on fire to
maintain a natural balance. In most of these areas, human
intervention, through eliminating much of the burning cycle, has
caused serious imbalances, resulting in an even more serious
threat. When fires do occur in these areas, they often burn much
hotter than they would in a natural regime, burning much deeper
into the
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root structures of plants. This situation leaves the hillsides
much more susceptible to landslides and debris flow in subsequent
winters. Additionally, these areas typically have little margin for
error in their water sources. If local watersheds are destroyed,
long-term economic and agricultural disruption may be the
result.
Human-made causes of fires include sparks from lawn mowers and
other yard tools, cigarettes carelessly tossed from a car, and
electrical wires blown into trees. The ease and numerous ways of
starting a catastrophic fire also create a strong temptation for
arsonists. Consequently, firefighting agencies have to maintain an
extremely high level of vigilance for fire starts, thus reducing
the threat posed by natural causes (such as lightning strikes),
human-made causes, and criminal acts.
Although the state of the art in physical remedies for fire
suppression is mature, the command and control of these resources
can be dramatically improved with better technology. Verbal command
systems break down in complex environments and must be enhanced
with digital systems. Information about fire perimeters and
intensities, derived in part from remote sensing and delivered to
field personnel, is necessary to optimize use of resources and
increase safety. Wearable computers could play a significant role
in fire suppression activities by assisting firefighters with such
information-intensive tasks as hazardous material identification
and by delivering information about building layouts or other
environmental information to firefighters in the field.
Earthquakes
Earthquakes are the most devastating of all natural disasters.
The cost can be prodigious—the 1995 Kobe, Japan, disaster
caused as much as $100 billion in damage. Hundreds of thousands of
people could die in a catastrophic earthquake. Modern building
techniques have greatly reduced the death toll in developed
countries, but the costs of earthquake-induced damage have
increased dramatically because of the enormous increase in the
built environment within high-risk areas. When major earthquakes do
strike, the damage can penetrate deep into physical infrastructure.
Roads and bridges are heavily damaged, as are pipelines carrying
natural gas, water, and petroleum; communications lines and
equipment are compromised; and satellite and microwave dishes are
knocked out of alignment. Earthquake damage can remain undetected
for years inside walls, underground, and deep in foundations. The
complexity of this kind of damage increases the amount of time
required to determine the extent of damage, so that reconstruction
can be done.
Earthquakes can be very destructive, and they occur nearly
instantaneously. In a minute or two perhaps a million or more
people are faced
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with constructing a new reality for themselves. There is no
warning time for evacuation, staging of resources, or seeking of
appropriate shelter. Emergency operation centers are not staffed up
in anticipation of increased activity.
Indeed, emergency staffing patterns are as much a victim of
earthquakes as the rest of the community. When the quake occurs,
nobody knows yet where it was centered or how strong it was, so
there is no way for people to grasp the overall context of their
immediate personal experiences. Was it the big one? Is it better to
leave home and go to a shelter? Are the phones working? People are
in a state of shock and need help to make decisions on how to
respond. Information is essential to address this dimension of the
earthquake problem.
In the first few minutes after a quake, massive amounts of
incident-generated information must be gathered from many sources.
It must then be synthesized, interpreted, and distributed to
everyone who needs it. Different kinds of information packages must
be created for different sectors of the response effort. Some
information can be mass distributed via television, radio, or the
Internet, whereas other information must be targeted to specific
incident responders, perhaps located at remote sites. The critical
time lines will vary from minutes to hours for mass-distributed
information, whereas the first responder may require a turn-around
time on the order of seconds to minutes. Analysis of the
information, such as for probable sheltering sites and medical and
rescue resources required to meet the disaster, must be completed
accurately and quickly and presented to critical decision makers in
an easily understood format.
Aftershocks are almost certain to occur but may be erratic in
their timing. As a result, extra care is required during many
rescue operations. Aftershocks also have implications with regard
to immediate sheltering needs. Following the Loma Prieta,
Northridge, and Kobe earthquakes, for example, hundreds of
thousands of people camped out on the streets for the first few
days until emergency shelters were set up or until they became
confident enough to go back into their homes. Early warning systems
for aftershocks could provide precious seconds to get rescue
workers out of harm's way, and better understanding and modeling of
the distribution and severity of aftershocks could provide the
necessary confidence for many people to reenter their homes.
Critical Infrastructure Failure or
Attack
The Administration has identified critical U.S.
infrastructures—such as water, communications, power, food,
and transportation—that must continue to function during and
after natural disasters or physical attacks. These infrastructures
are all extensively supported by information tech-
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nology systems and therefore are vulnerable when the information
technology systems are attacked or fail abruptly—as is
expected from electronic clock mechanisms at midnight on December
31, 1999. To deal with these threats, Presidential Decision
Directive 63, issued in May 1998, called for a national effort to
assure the security of critical U.S. infrastructures. Because the
government does not operate most of these infrastructures, these
efforts must be conducted in collaboration with the private-sector
owners and operators.
The federal approach to dealing with critical infrastructure
issues, especially the looming year 2000 (Y2K) problem, was
described by Bruce McConnell, then chief of the information policy
and technology branch of the Office of Information and Regulatory
Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.
McConnell said that the federal government can use help in
developing a coordinated detection system for dealing with a series
of questions such as the following: How does one know that a system
is actually going down? And then how does one diagnose what is
happening? Is the problem a symptom of a coordinated attack or a
series of coincidences? Is there a law enforcement or national
security problem?
McConnell spoke about the expected Y2K scenarios and some of the
technical problems that are being addressed. The experience will be
used as a laboratory for studying and improving the response to
critical infrastructure incidents, particularly in cyberspace, he
said. Indeed, he observed that if one had set out to create a
disaster scenario to test IT vulnerabilities and response
capabilities, it would be difficult to come up with one better than
the Y2K problem.
Officials expect that multiple problems will occur in different
places at the same time. In the United States, it is anticipated
that the major organizations and pieces of the infrastructure will
function adequately but that problems may arise in rural areas and
in small and medium-sized enterprises. Thus, local power and
telephone companies, and some less technologically sophisticated
systems such as water treatment plants could, experience outages.
Many of these have microprocessors embedded in device
controllers.
More generally, three basic issues must be addressed in critical
infrastructure failure. First, how will officials get information?
When the workload in a crisis center increases 100-fold, will the
IT system have the capacity to feed that information to the
necessary recipients? The Administration has been exploring, for
example, how to handle multiple events at once. As local response
capabilities become saturated, the workload will spill over to the
state and federal levels. At that point, the higher echelons may
have a limited capability to respond, so there will be heavy
reliance on local capacity, at least at the beginning.
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Second, citizens will want to know early on if there is a crisis
and how the nation is holding up. Specific information can reduce
panic. For example, in the case of Y2K, plans are being made for a
White House representative, such as the President's assistant on
Y2K matters, to provide a status report early in the afternoon of
Saturday, January 1,2000. Of course, many will learn from news
reports starting with the events that take place at midnight in New
Zealand, where the new year arrives 17 hours before it does in
Washington, D.C.
Third, the government will try to make decisions in real time
about where help should be sent. This approach has been taken
before in major disasters such as the explosion in the federal
building in Oklahoma City, so critical disaster response groups
already have been organized for Y2K. Some exercises performed
during 1999 will help with evaluation of the information flow and
capacities.
Federal agencies are expending substantial resources to address
the Y2K problem. Some agencies are deferring capital improvements
in their information infrastructures so they can deal with Y2K
issues first, whereas others are using the opportunity to
recapitalize in critical areas of their infrastructure to build
next-generation, Y2K-compliant systems. At lower levels of
government, emergency managers from metropolitan areas are
collaborating to monitor the status of Y2K planning, and they are
also working with private corporations.
Urban Search and Rescue at the Murrah
Federal Building Bombing
Geographical information systems (GISs) (Box B.2) played an
important role in the response to the April 19, 1995, bombing of
the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Following
the explosion, rescuers did not know if they were looking for 100
or 300 people in the building, and they needed a precise map to
target locations to look for people. To help build this map, they
relied on a variety of sources, including interviews with the
building maintenance manager. In recognition of the utility of GISs
in Oklahoma City, especially the value of having people dedicated
to sorting out information, the urban search and rescue
organization permanently added two GIS positions to the incident
support team.
Several lessons about the use of information systems emerged
from the experience of the GIS unit at Oklahoma City:
• Once an initial set of data is made available to
responders, updates and changes must be made. As soon as responders
enter a damaged building, they will undoubtedly discover
discrepancies between the pre-existing data and the actual
situations they encounter (many a result of
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BOX B.2 Geographical Information
Systems
Geographical information systems (GISs)—computer systems
that manage, display, and support analysis of geographical
reference data—are increasingly being used to fill many crisis
management needs. All phases of crisis management deal with many
location-specific details, drawn from sources including remote
sensing and Global Positioning System (GPS) data on the region of
an event and its effects. A GIS assists in managing such
information by associating related geographic information and
integrating multiple geographic information elements during a
crisis. GIS offers a number of capabilities of interest for crisis
management:
• Dynamic capabilities. Unlike a static map, a GIS
database can be updated during the course of a disaster to reflect
what is known about the environment and situation during the
response efforts. For example, following some disasters such as
earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or floods, the topography itself
will have changed. In others, the topography itself may not have
changed but the built environment, including, roads, buildings, and
utility services, will have been affected. Crisis response is
greatly assisted when changes such as damaged roads can be
reflected quickly in maps used to coordinate response
efforts.
• Ease of distribution. When put into a GIS, spatial
data can be reproduced electronically for distribution and access
(e.g., through a network, Web access, or dial-up modem), and
updates can be distributed as required to reflect changes in the
situation.
• Tool for analysis of data. In contrast to maps, a GIS
provides an effective way to combine many types of data of value
for crisis management. For example, linguistic demographic data
might be imported into a GIS to determine the need for translators
in the aftermath of a crisis. Data from a variety of sources, such
as laser rangefinders or remote sensing, can also be imported
directly into a GIS and further analyzed and modeled. Results of
spatial models can be integrated together with incident data,
existing map bases, and remotely sensed information.1
To give another example, following the Northridge
earthquake, the results of an earthquake shake model were overlaid
with zip code information to speed up processing of damage claims.
A list of zip codes for areas that had shaking intensities of VIII
or greater was produced. Based on this information all claims in
these zip codes could be given emergency checks immediately without
waiting for case-by-case field verification.
The geographical data used in a crisis varies according to
location. Some states have extensive GISs of their own with
up-to-date details. These systems include information on evacuation
routes and location of emergency shelters and estimates of
populations-at-risk at various times of the day. Other sources used
include background GIS maps, including roads and locations of
industry; census data and some commercially available data sets;
and aerial photographs for the area. When these preexisting data
sets are available, they are used. When not available, special sets
will be created using aircraft photography or imaging from remote
sensing facilities.
Some types of crises place special requirements for accurate and
precise geographical data sets. For example, workshop participants
noted that in many cases there are inaccuracies in the definitions
of floodplains because topography is insufficiently understood.
When dealing with a flood, 1 foot In elevation can make a major
difference, yet topographical maps are typically accurate to plus
or minus 5 or 10 feet. During the 1997 and 1998 floods in
California, problems with levee breaks were difficult to handle
because nobody knew where the breaks were (since then, California
levee maps have been improved).
___________
1A recent NSF-sponsored workshop
explored research issues related to the integration of multiple
data types and sources. See David M. Mark, ed. February 1999.
Geographic Information Science: Critical Issues in an Emerging
Cross-Disciplinary Research Domain. National Center for
Geographical Information and Analysis, State University of New York
at Buffalo. Available online at <http://www.geog.buffalo.edu/ncgia/workshopreport.html>.
the disaster itself). This information is of great value to the
entire response team. The ability to easily modify existing spatial
data is one of the strengths of using digital data rather than, for
example, printed maps.
• The level of preparedness and the element of surprise in
a disaster such as the bombing in Oklahoma City affect what will be
required in responding to an emergency. Indeed, a critical factor
in the success of the Oklahoma City GIS support was that digital
floor plans were available. These plans, which had been developed
by a local architectural firm for a remodeling project involving
the whole building, enabled the GIS team to ramp up quickly and to
provide operations maps within hours. The more complex the
structure, the more important it is to have preexisting information
in a readily usable format available for emergency personnel.
• The reliability of the information provided to rescuers
is a signifi-
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cant concern. The information developed by the GIS team in the
Murrah building was developed by experienced personnel working
directly with the people in the best position to have the correct
information—thus the information had a high degree of
accuracy. Preidentified data sources, reliable data paths, and
reliable remote sensing technologies, crossed-checked with other
sources for validation, are what contribute to developing data that
will be believed. In contrast, information gleaned from other
sources, such as the results of Web searches of various public
sites, is not likely to be held in high esteem. Given the rule of
thumb adopted by many crisis responders—that one-third of the
information is accurate, one-third is wrong, and one-third might be
either right or wrong—they are likely to be reluctant to rely
too much on the outside information they are provided.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
geographical information
