The advent of GIS applications has made it much easier to track the spread of large-scale incidents like wildfire and public safety power shutoffs (PSPS) — and the necessary evacuations and black-outs. But at a recent gathering of county-level IT chiefs, the leaders — including award winners from Contra Costa County — shared notes and identified potential hurdles and good news. Among the takeaways:
• Having those easy-to-use solutions in place before an event hits is key, Isaac Cabrera, GIS administrator at Contra Costa County, said Nov. 5 at the 2019 California County Information Services Directors Association (CCISDA) Fall Conference near Lake Tahoe. His county had stood up a new dashboard suite for its fire department when a recent PSPS hit.
“We were just able to use this malleable product and add a new tab to it so they could have situational awareness of anything that was happening,” Cabrera said.
• CCISDA recognized the agency, which includes 19 incorporated cities and serves more than 1 million residents, for developing its Contra Costa County Regional Emergency GIS Initiative. The county received its Operational Effectiveness award for large counties. Accessible through ArcGIS, the initiative has 17 counties and five cities as members, plus the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (CalOES) and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It offers solutions to members including a tool for PSPS; and dashboard, Web and mobile apps for evacuations, with others in development. As with Contra Costa’s fire dashboard, these can be tailored to fit.
“You can copy it down into your own organization, you can adapt it and save it for your own use there. The whole idea is, the templates are there and they connect to the data through authoritative sources,” Cabrera told Techwire.
The initiative offered the county the opportunity to consolidate some services, Chief Information Officer Marc Shorr said at CCISDA — and recent events have strengthened existing relationships.
“We were already making some great strides on offering this as an enterprise-level service. Over the last month, we had an opportunity to really be part of our public safety team in our responses and support for our earthquakes, our fires; and our friends at PG&E, what they brought to our workload. It was a great opportunity for us to step up and be part of that public safety team,” Shorr said.
• Map your device landscape ahead of time, and be ready to pivot, Butte County Information Systems Department Director Art Robison said. His agency had just started to use mobile devices for damage assessments last November when the Camp Fire struck. As the incident grew, additional devices appeared, staffers headed out to do assessments “and we were trying to develop things on the fly,” Robison said. He indicated Butte was able to tweak its app remotely from its Emergency Operations Center, “borrowing knowledge from other counties, essentially”; and equipment from Esri, which also assisted with licensing.
• Identify your agency’s GIS capabilities and whether you’re in an Esri ArcGIS environment, as well as relevant URLs and emergency points of contact — and communicate those up to the state, said Chris Jones-Roberts, lead GIS specialist at CalOES.
“That will help us when a large disaster comes in, we can go reach right out to them and get the data that we need. Also set up pre-established sharing groups,” Jones-Roberts said at the CCISDA GIS workgroup.
