The use of geospatial information to support emergency responders was explained to a capacity audience of conference attendees March 11, during the keynote address of the first-ever Geospatial Dimensions of Emergency Response Symposium during Conference 31.

Craig Skalet, senior geospatial advisor, U.S. Geological Survey, USGS Emergency Operations Office, described the history of the USGS and the response process during a natural hazard event. “The USGS has five disciplines,” began Skalet. “Biology, geography, geology, water, and the geospatial information office.”

“When an event occurs an executive committee is created and the executive director leads the support for the event,” he continued. “A team is also formed depending on the event (i.e. earthquake, landslide, wildland fire, etc.) and a geospatial information response team (GIRT) is put together.

As Skalet pointed out, natural hazard events usually do not recognize boundaries or borders. He listed some of the events which are dealt with on a fairly regular basis:

“As part of our system architecture, we have emergency response systems in South Dakota which includes Pixia, ESRI and Sun Technology. The portal provides a single point of entry for the emergency response user community,” Skalet said. System demands come in both positive and negative forms as the system is constantly under attack by those wanting to get in and attack them, just as in the commercial sector. He presented a graph showing that the volume of hacking and related security issues have doubled since 2003.

“On the positive side, we are supporting a tremendous flow of information; 2.18 billion monthly maps were delivered in 2007.” Skalet explained that the U.S. belongs to the International Charter, a consortium of countries to support emergency situations throughout the world and provide information for those events. “When an event occurs, an authorized user contacts members in the consortium and this triggers up all the satellites from members to get information for a targeted area. We have activated this recently for tornadoes in Tennessee and fires in California.”

John Wesley Powell's vision of a national map began in 1889, with a goal for it to be completed in 1908. “We finally finished the 24K mapping program in 1990,” said Skalet. “The average map is 25-30 years old. In some parts of the country that’s okay, but 180 million people live in urban areas where this information is constantly changing and must be current.”

He said that many of the map layers are “stovepipes” and that the “names” layer needs to be integrated with the other vector layers. He also pointed out an instances during Hurricane Katrina where 911 calls poured in for help with callers giving addresses that were no longer there or under water. USGS was asked to translate these addresses into geographic coordinate positions and map them in order to aid in the search and rescue effort.