A Tabletop Exercise (TTX) is an excellent way to go through the motions of an event that is not part of your typical routine or just difficult or expensive to replicate.  I have personally participated in many TTX.  Some very good, some not so much; in my opinion the relative success of a TTX is how absorbed I get in the scenario.  If I can picture myself in the moment, making those decisions, then afterward I feel better prepared for the real thing.  However, in many of the TTX I’ve participated in, I find myself just reading verbatim or regurgitating the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) of the organization.  This, in turn, leaves me feeling like in the heat of the moment I’ll be in pretty bad shape if I don’t have time to open up the manual, leaving me discouraged or thinking how unrealistic that exercise was.

There are lots of factors to why a TTX is successful or not, or how much the participants will take away from the exercise.  In my experience one common thing that is lacking in the not so successful exercises is a good visual component.  As humans, we can gather and process more information from a picture than the same scene described in text.  During this webinar I will demonstrate some of the things Depiction can do to add a good visual component (and more) to your next Tabletop Exercise.

This webinar is free to attend! Alan Woodward, EOC Planning Sections Chief at LANL, will highlight several tabletop exercises, scenario simulations and take questions from attendees. This webinar is great for individuals, organizations and companies interested in preparedness planning and consequence assessment. Alan comments that LANL uses Depiction for its “ease of use, flat learning curve, professionalism and fast in-field collaboration capability”.

Attendees will learn how Depiction can be used to create simulations and facilitate ‘in the moment’ cooperation whether for a national laboratory, your neighborhood, fire department, police department, local government organizations or emergency field teams.

Alan Woodward joins us as our guest presenter September 22nd at 10:30am PST. He has worked in the Emergency Operations Division for 10 years as an analyst, emergency planner, and Section chief with over thirteen years experience developing geographic information systems (GIS) and GIS products. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Washington State University (in Physics) and a Master of Science degree from Oklahoma State University (in Plant and Soil Sciences). Currently, he is focused on developing GIS applications for emergency responders that can be used in an EOC or at the site of an emergency.

Also joining in to field questions and provide additional information are Rachel Hixson, Dave McClard and Bill Purtymun.

Rachel Hixson is a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialist with a Master of Arts degree in Geography from Arizona State University.  She is helping to develop the GIS capabilities of LANL’s Emergency Operations Center.  She has also been working on reverse plume modeling for a national bio-surveillance program at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for three years.

Dave McClard works in the EO-EM Group as an Emergency Manager. Current responsibilities: Focus on response management, Emergency Operations Center (EOC) operability, planning and preparedness activities, communication operations, aviation operations, and wildland fire operations. Dave began emergency management work in 1986 as a search and rescue (SAR) pilot and search and rescue trainer. His last five years were spent as the State Emergency Services Director and squadron commander for an auxiliary of the United States Air Force.

Bill Purtymun originally became involved in emergency management as a Firefighter III/ EMT Paramedic.   He graduated from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology with a BS in Geology. He has been employed at Los Alamos National Laboratory since 1989, initially as a Site Safety Officer for a non-reactor nuclear facility.  In the mid 1990’s he became a LANL Emergency Manager and Incident Commander for the Emergency Operations Division.  For the past several years he has worked in Hazard and Consequence Assessment at the LANL Emergency Operations Center.  In his spare time he volunteers with the local ski and mountain bike patrol and is a Nationally Registered Paramedic.   He is currently working on his masters in Emergency Management through Arizona State University.

Join us on September 22nd at 10:30am PST to learn more about how your organization can be better prepared, cross collaborate more efficiently and benefit from the Depiction software platform.

The planning committee spent the last two months putting this drill together. As I understand it, most of the city staff has ICS training from FEMA, so this drill put that to the test. The Fire Chief acts as the EOC director, as the city does not have an emergency manager. The scenario for the 4-hour drill was a 30-inch snowfall over 3 days, which takes out the power and home phone service for the entire city (pop. 16,000). In preparation a member of the planning committee put together a Microsoft Access database to record events and track resources. Rob also put together 2 depictions of the city: 1 with all the events in it and one “blank”. I copied those files to my computer and used an email account to send events from the full depiction to the empty on via Live Reports, as Rob placed events “manually” as the scenario unfolded. Both processes worked well, and his became more effective when the internet and cell service went out in the scenario (the IT guys killed internet and I disconnected my wireless card). Rob also made use of the “Bring to center” button in the Manage content menu to make the newly placed events flash on the screen.

One of Rob’s hopes for the event was to bring attention to the depiction, which was projected on  a 5′ screen from the ceiling. For the first hour or so, not many people took not, but by hour 3, folks in the front, middle and back of the room were consulting the depiction. Their main comment? “We need it bigger!” With 34 events on the map, many flashing and text shown to describe them, 5′ was not enough space. They’ll be looking into buying a 10′ screen.

A clipping of the events simulated in the drill

This was a very effective drill, and I was impressed by the dedication, attention and knowledge of the staff. I was also glad that one of the outcomes was a decision to move away from the 5-copy carbonless-paper form to report events to the room, hoping instead to provide each area of expertise with access to the ICS database to view and update events. Depiction could also help, and I will be working closely with Rob and his colleagues in coming months to help this happen.

• Formidable Footprint Exercise Preview, 10/28/2010
• SAR Tabletop Exercise, 8/28/2010
• Enable Tabletop Disaster Exercises with GIS Using Depiction, 9/30/2010

Please let us know if we can help you plan or coordinate a local exercise (or if you plan to use Depiction in one).

Happy Depicting!

To make your shapefile:
1. Run the scenario and display the threat zone in ALOHA.
2. Open MARPLOT and click on the lat/long where the chemical was released.
3. From the ALOHA Sharing menu in MARPLOT, choose Set Source Point. The ALOHA threat zone is now displayed in MARPLOT with the source point of the release at the lat/long location that you clicked on.
4. In MARPLOT, select the ALOHA threat zone.
5. In MARPLOT File menu, choose Export Overlay Objects.
6. On the Export dialog, choose the Shapefile format. Note that if you have selected both polygon objects (the threat zones) and point objects (the ALOHA source point and/or the ALOHA threat point) you will need to perform separate exports for each type of object.

This assumes that the user is already familiar with ALOHA and MARPLOT, and considering the number of requests we have gotten for this information, many Depiction users are.

The user was also kind enough to send a depiction he then created using this method. I have altered it a bit (changed colors to match the descriptions of red, orange and yellow zones and the icons to our plume icon) for posting a clip here.

Screen capture of ALOHA/MARPLOT files in Depiction

I hope this will make Depiction all the more useful for our Emergency Management users.

Happy Depicting!

George

The challenge was to get the shape file data loaded and  then geo-code the address data.

The first challenge was to get the shape file loaded.  The main issue here was because of the shape of the fire district in order to get the entire district in one story also meant getting non-district territory included.  This wouldn’t have been a problem but the file from the county was of the entire county and not just the district, so when the shape file was loaded it included the shapes for the non-district territory as well.  Unfortunately this added about 2000 more shapes to the file which of course would have had an performance impact.  So I ended up cutting the district in half and having two files.  I still had non-district shapes but an acceptable number.

So at this point I had the parcel boundaries loaded and went to load the data files.  I extracted the district parcels from an Access data file to an excel spreadsheet.  The situs address on each record was broken into several fields; street no, direction, name; city, state, zip.  I used the concatenate command in excel to join the fields together in a field called “Location” which is one of the field names that Depiction recognizes for geo-coding and I had to make sure that none of the other field headers included one of the valid fields such as “address”.  After doing this and reviewing the file I realized that many parcels didn’t have addresses.  In addition to that this district is in a rural area with a combination of small lots and multi-acre parcels.  The geo-coding algorithm works pretty in good in urban areas but not so good in rural areas.  It gets you in the neighborhood but that is about it.

So my quandary was how to deal with the parcels with no addresses and how to figure out where the ones with addresses actually went on the map.  In looking at the tax account # I realized it was made up of Township, Range, Section and then an “XY” coordinate.  I remembered that the assessor parcel maps usually had the XY coordinate on the lot and the TRS info was also on the map.  So I went to the assessor’s online site and found the maps.  I took a screen shot of each one and then cropped it down to the area I wanted and then converted the BMP files to JPG to save space.  Then I loaded each map into my Depiction and geo-aligned it with the parcel shapes. (Update: after further review I discovered the quality of image from the screen shots wasn’t that good and many of the numbers were illegible. Instead I downloaded the native PDF files from the assessor and then used a program to convert them to jpegs.)

Next I separated my data file into North and South sections to match my Depiction Map files which I could do by the Section Township Range info in each record.  Then I sorted each file by address.  The parcels with a “0” address sorted to the top.  I then created a new worksheet in excel and cut and pasted the “0” address parcel info to the new worksheet.

Next I took a known valid address in my map area and inputted it in to the “Location” field of the first record in my spreadsheet. I then copied that cell across the other records.  This incremented the address number by one.  So now I had a file with valid addresses.  I did this because I wasn’t sure what depiction would do with an invalid address.  Next I saved the file as a CSV file and then resaved the original file as an XLS file so I wouldn’t mess up my data.

Then I went into my depiction.  I was going to use the “HOME” element for my parcels with houses on them but I wanted a different icon for vacant land.  So I created a “HOME” element then I right clicked on it and edited it.  I changed the name to Vacant Land and I changed the icon to the shape file icon because I didn’t have anything better. Then I saved it to my library and at which time I had a new element called vacant land.

Then I chose the add menu item and File underneath that and then browsed to my CSV file and chose it and the selected vacant land as the element type and pressed the add button and a few minutes later my vacant land icons appeared in a row.

Next I created a CSV file of the worksheet of the parcels with addresses and loaded them. As I mentioned earlier the icons appeared in the general area but not in the exact location.

In both cases above when the program finished loading it came up with the edit screen for that element type.  Before I closed it I did the following:

1.    Changed the property to allow dragging
2.    Set the hover text to the fields I wanted to display.
3.    Changed the ICON size to Tiny because there will be a lot of icons on the screen.

So now I was ready to manually place each icon in the right location.  In the hover text this included the tax account number which I had reformatted to make it easier to read. So using a revealer I displayed the assessor map for the area I was working on moused over an ICON saw the account # and then looked for that XY coordinate on the assessor map and when I found it I moved the icon to that parcel.  I am still working on this process to move each icon.

So when I checked in with the Chief to discuss this we realized some of the drawbacks of this process.  One was that it would be easy for someone to accidentally or on purpose move an icon. Also it wouldn’t be easy to make a bunch of changes in the data base and reload it because you would have to relocate all of the icons which a fairly time consuming.  So what we are thinking about doing is once we have located all of the parcels to mouse over each one and transfer the Lat Long info back to the spreadsheet.  Once we have done that then we could delete all of the parcel data and reload anytime.  Now the Chief says once we have located all the parcels it would be nice to locate all of the propane tanks on each parcel.  Another project for another day.  I will keep you all posted with how we are progressing.

Another update. A new requirement came up and that was to identify properties that paid DNR tax for forest fire protection. A new file was received from the Assessor with this info. Since I was redoing things decided to start over. Broke the district into 3 sections to eliminate extra shape files. When I broke up the district I did it on Section boundaries so that it would be easier to group the assessor records for each section. Broke the assessor data into 4 parts for each of the 3 areas. Improved W FF, Improved WO FF, Vacant W FF and Vacant WO FF. Made 4 new icons. I basically took two existing icons and changed their colors to represent homes and vacant land with and without FF.