Emergency Services GIS

Today, GIS is used by Emergency Services personnel (fire, emergency medical, disaster) to plan their response to various scenarios, evaluate mitigation options, analyze events, and predict potential future scenarios. An example of GIS in emergency services is using a GIS to provide critical information to incident responders en route to an emergency. This can include evaluating the best street route for emergency vehicles. Using traffic data, GIS can plot the fastest route to an emergency and from the emergency to a hospital. Crime units use GIS to manage their crime location databases and can analyze crime over time intervals across city blocks. This helps them prioritize their manpower to address crime surgically and not diffused. GIS is also used in the science part of emergency services: epidemiological and public health monitoring, where a variety of data (human health, demographics, pollution sources) can be analyzed using sophisticated models and algorithms to provide crucial insight into disease clusters, environmental risks and vectors of disease.

GIS & Emergency Services

Emergency Services personnel have a variety of sophisticated GIS tools at their disposal, from reliable scenario and research models to hand-held GIS data collectors. In fact, GIS allows Emergency Services personnel to present their challenges and accomplishments to decision makers, media, and the public with maps and GIS based graphs and statistics better than ever. GIS mapping can output clear and concise maps in many forms: web, reports, and wall maps. GIS maps are more professional in design that they have ever been. A well designed poster map created in GIS and plotted on a large format printer can often be an invaluable and irreplaceable tool for Emergency Services. Large format maps find places on the operations room wall, often covered with pushpins and stick-notes, or on the table in meetings, helping to plot the way for future resource allocation and preparedness. In a service that requires fast, accurate, and solid analysis, GIS is a highly prized tool in Emergency Services.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites