Utility Mapping

Energy Currents, Winter 2002
—by Barbara Shields

The very day that EGUG members were traveling to the user group conference at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the United States launched its strategic air attack on terrorist forces in Afghanistan. Subjected to long lines in airports, delays caused by heightened airport protection, police, and U.S. National Guard bomb security squads, the realization of a country at war weighed heavily on the electric and gas GIS community.

John Ross of PPL and David Frye of ESRI told of their personal experiences in lending their GIS expertise to the Ground Zero events in New York City immediately following the disaster. David Frye reflects on his first day at the command center in New York City. "I walked into a blaze of activity," reflects David as many people furtively joined forces to provide technological assistance. The command post had set up an emergency management system in an undisclosed area of the City. John recalls that plotters were running night and day. The fire department leaned heavily on maps the GIS produced.

The City of New York Emergency Mapping Center relied on aerial photos with GIS data of images overlaid on the World Trade Center building damage. Maps were made for the Manhattan staging area and dispersed to on-site workers.

Utility outage maps showed areas of no electricity, no gas, and no water. Maps of fuel tanks near the World Trade Center within a secured area depicted volatility of facilities in the danger zone so that a course of action could be taken to extract fuel tanks or have crews on standby. This short-term response using GIS provided accurate thematic location information to teams working at the site.

Responding to the devastation in New York City brings us all to ask ourselves how the utility industry can fortify itself and become active in the nation's homeland security effort. Those of us in the GIS field realize that our capabilities are particularly relevant to building company plans and developing interaction with local forces for effective response.

Perhaps more than most, the utility industry has developed its own proficiency in dealing with disasters, and its response systems have become models for many others to follow. We have learned that the common elements of emergency management are planning, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. GIS is integral in the construction of these response components.

Planning: Homeland security programs begin with understanding the problem. This involves strategic and tactical planning to locate and identify potential emergency management problems and, using GIS, pinpointing these hazards and evaluating the consequences of potential attacks, emergencies, or disasters. The plan should identify obvious hazards such as nuclear plants, infrastructure hot spots (such as the intersection of gas mains and high-voltage assets), and other potential hazards or targets. The hazard data can be viewed with other maps data (population density, streets, pipelines, power lines) to develop a risk assessment.

Mitigation: Once the risk assessment has been completed, GIS analysis can easily determine adjoining structures, utilities, and affected population areas to the hazard. It can identify the potential impact of outages. Other mitigation efforts may target hazardous leaks and establish security buffers around high-risk structures or environmental health monitoring. Mitigation involves understanding potential hazards at risk from these emergencies and targeting them for protective and/or preventive action.

Preparedness: Preparedness includes those activities that prepare for actual emergencies. These activities include contingency planning, model building, and training. In an emergency, GIS can be used to answer questions such as "Where should first responder teams be staged to improve response time and capability?" or "What critical assets have been lost?"

Response: The first priority in responding to a disaster is the safekeeping of people and the management of life-threatening situations such as fire, explosions, loose wires, or collapse of structures. Managers seek to stabilize the situation and reduce the probability of secondary damage (for example, shutting off contaminated water supply sources or cordoning off affected areas to prevent further injury) as well as to speed up other emergency operations for victims.

Recovery: Recovery efforts begin when the immediate threat to life, property, and critical infrastructure is over. Recovery efforts are often in two phases—short term and long term.

Short-term recovery efforts can be visually displayed and quickly updated. A visual status map can be accessed and viewed from remote locations by critical decision makers. This is particularly helpful for large emergencies or disasters where multiple efforts are ongoing at different locations. GIS is critical to understanding the scope, complexity, and severity of the emergency as well as distinguishing available assets from those lost or no longer available. In addition, laptop computers and handheld wireless devices can update the primary database from the field.

Long-term recovery means restoring all services to normal or better. Long-term recovery, such as replacement of buildings, facilities, power systems, and streets, can take several years. GIS can be used during this period to identify facilities, assess damage, and establish prioritization for major restoration projects. As funds are allocated for repairs, accounting information can be recorded and linked to each location.

Community Effort

Sharing data between agencies is of paramount importance in a communal response to disaster. Creation of an enterprise homeland security GIS database enables emergency managers to

• Assess risks to community and infrastructure.
• Establish specific mitigation/protection plans.
• Determine the scale of the emergency.
• Estimate rate of spread or progression.
• Identify and evacuate at-risk populations.
• Expedite and direct rescue efforts.
• Provide accurate damage assessment.
• Prioritize recovery efforts.

A response system needs to be able to support a common language system for integrating information, activities, and processes. GIS provides an ideal framework for cross-community sharing. GIS offers task solutions from inventorying and forecasting to decision and policy making. It offers a language for working on common problems. From global communities to local communities, GIS can create common spatial data infrastructures.

The critical effort should be the creation of a centralized spatial database for each community, county, state, and ultimately the federal government. For those databases that are proprietary or controlled for security reasons, the effort should be to obtain advanced permissions and/or access codes to secure the information when a disaster occurs. That access could be in the form of a secure link with coded access. This type of approach allows the creation of a secure, shareable, distributed database for spatial information that can make communities more resistant to attacks/disasters as well as more responsive to an actual event. This network can be based on g.net architecture, creating a geography network for homeland security.

The value of building data warehouses for each community as well as obtaining permissions and access to invaluable proprietary data sets cannot be stressed enough. Gathering data to create a GIS to meet potential emergencies requires an immediate and concentrated effort. It is far easier to accomplish this task before an attack or emergency than in its aftermath.