GIS and Mapping
“We Need It Bigger”
Dec 3rd
I had the good fortune this week to attend the first EOC (Emergency Operations Center) drill in Anacortes, WA. The GIS manager for the city, Rob Hoxie, has designated Depiction as their EOC mapping solution, and asked me to join him in the EOC.
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.
Election Mapping Presentation
Nov 24th
Yesterday’s webinar also sparked the idea to turn the election mapping process into a PowerPoint presentation:
The process itself is fairly easy–the hard part is tracking down the GIS data and election results, and the even harder part is dealing with election results that aren’t put into a ‘machine readable format’ like a spreadsheet. Some states & counties do that for your, others don’t–if they don’t it might be easier to go directly to the government agency responsible and see if they can get you a spreadsheet. If not, though, the majority of the presentation deals with tracking down, then slicing and dicing the data so that you can merge it with the GIS data. The actual merging and colorizing of the data–what Depiction does–is really very easy.
And that part is applicable to any number of tasks–any time you need to merge data with map data such as shapefiles. If you aren’t interested in the election stuff, the information starting on slide 20 may still be valuable.
Depiction of the Week: St. Louis County, MN 2010 Congressional Election
Nov 19th
St. Louis County, MN 2010 ElectionThis month’s historic election gave the Republican party a larger gain than any single party has seen since the 1940’s, but that broad, national trend was made up of many decisions made at the smallest possible level–the level of the individual. Now, Depiction can’t really map things quite down to that level, (there’s a thing called a secret ballot), Depiction can help you do the next best thing, and create “hyperlocal” election maps at the precinct level.
This week’s Depiction of the Week is one such map. Possibly the biggest single surprise in the election outcome was the result in Minnesota’s 8th District, in the northeast part of the state along Lake Superior. After representing the district since 1974, Democrat Jim Oberstar lost to Republican Chip Cravaack. This depiction shows the precinct level results in St. Louis County, which is where Duluth, the largest city in the district, is located.
I’ll be doing a webinar on Tuesday, November 23, “Hyperlocal Election Maps Made Easy” showing how you can create depictions like this one–and even more complex ones–very easily. If this is the sort of thing you’re interested in, I hope to see you there!
And once you’ve built them, of course, Depiction lets you combine them with all kinds of maps, data and images, whether publicly available or your own proprietary information. Want to see what voting patterns look like based on proximity to schools or other points of interest? No problem. You can even overlay them with scanned paper maps or routes, and much more.
Minnesota has some particularly good resources for building election depictions. Shapefiles of districts, precincts and even election results can be accessed here. Up-to-date election results can be accessed here in semicolon-delimited format. You can convert these into spreadsheets pretty easily using Excel.
St.Louis County 2010 Congressional Election Results
To view this depiction, download the Depiction Free Reader .
Depiction & OpenStreetMap Webinar
Nov 15th
Hurricane Coast, who will be a special guest presenter during our Depiction & OpenStreetMap GIS Day Webinar, has posted a bit more about Wednesday’s event on the MapQuest blog:
In the past months, we have been excited to talk about MapQuest’s involvement with OpenStreetMap. But what exactly is this project about and how can you be apart of it you ask? This Wednesday, November 17th, at 2PM EST, Hurricane Coast will co-host a free webinar that will help new folks get started with OpenStreetMap (OSM).
The webinar is a perfect way to get your hands dirty in a hands-on style. The hour long session will cover everything from history about OSM and cool stories of how the project ‘saved lives’ to walking you through the sign-up process and showing you how to make your first edit.
We’re excited to be hosting this, and we hope you can make it!
Depiction GIS Day Events
Nov 9th
Next Wednesday, November 17 is GIS Day, and we at Depiction, along with some friends, have three events that may be of interest to you.
Anyone with an interest in mapping should be sure to attend OpenStreetMap and Depiction, which will be a great way for Depiction users to learn about the data brought in from OpenStreetMap, for OpenStreetMap contributors to learn about how their data is being used with Depiction, and a great introduction for folks who don’t know about either of these great tools. The webinar will be hosted by Depiction staff, and by Hurricane Coast, a community advocate, OSM contributor and Program Manager for the Open Initiative at MapQuest; and Russell Deffner, a Depiction Preferred Consultant, freelance journalist, volunteer wildland firefighter, and the volunteer GIS specialist for the American Red Cross Mile High Chapter.
For those in the Seattle area, you’re invited to a GIS Day Open House at the Depiction offices. We’re excited to be opening our doors to our users and other interested folks–we’d love to have you out to Everett to meet some of the people behind Depiction, answer your questions, mingle with other Depiction users and–most exciting of all–get a sneak preview of the next version. Click here to get directions.
Finally, the morning of the 17th, Depiction Preferred Consultant Ric Skinner will be giving an EMForum webinar about his book “GIS in Hospital & Healthcare Emergency management”. While not strictly a Depiction event, this is a great opportunity for anyone involved with emergency management, particularly in a hospital or other health care setting, to learn more about how mapping tools like Depiction can enhance your preparedness, response and recovery.
Depiction of the Week: Fourmile Fire
Oct 26th
This week’s “Depiction of the Week” was not built by me. This was put together by Depiction Preferred Consultant and emergency volunteer Russell Deffner. In the guest post below, Russell details the story of how he put the depiction together. For more on this, and how the depiction was used, he’ll be presenting “Depicting the Fourmile Fire” on next Thursday, November 4.
On September 6, 2010, around 10 AM, a fire was reported in the 7100 block of Fourmile Canyon Drive, west of Boulder, Colorado. By about noon that Monday–Labor Day–it was clear this fire was dangerous. We get quite a bit of wildfire in Colorado, but when the local news starts breaking into normal television programming, you know that it isn’t the typical isolated fire in the wilderness; it’s either big, near homes, or both. For many reasons, I wanted a better visual of the incident than I could get by just watching the news. As a Depiction Preferred Consultant, a freelance journalist, a volunteer wildland firefighter, and the volunteer GIS specialist for the American Red Cross Mile High Chapter, I began depicting the incident as it unfolded.
The first size up to be reported on the news was at about 2 PM and it was estimated to be 200 acres. From my experience as a wildland firefighter I knew two things: first, that’s a good size for only 4 hours of burn time, and second, from the video taken by the news helicopter, it was clearly much bigger than that. About two hours later my suspicion was confirmed when the news reported the size estimate at 2200 acres.
In this depiction you can view my use of the plume element to roughly estimate the fire perimeter around this time. There are three estimates conveniently packaged in a Revealer. I soon learned that the Boulder County Office of Emergency Management was releasing information fairly rapidly on their website (which turned out to be quicker and more accurate than the local news channels) and that is where the majority of the data in this depiction came from.
Although originally I had not built this depiction with any particular use in mind, it turned out to be extremely beneficial to various groups within the Red Cross as a common operating picture. As this fire continued, many people were tragically displaced from the area (grey shaded area) and needed shelter; at one point an area inside the Boulder city limits was put on notice (the red shaded area) because a high wind warning created the potential for the fire to spread into the city. Though they have been removed from this depiction (to respect privacy), I was able to quickly add, by importing a spreadsheet, all the Red Cross shelters in and around Boulder in preparation, because the potential evacuation zone would have created roughly 30,000 additional evacuees. Luckily the fireline held and the evacuation inside city limits never happened.
Unfortunately the Fourmile fire, as it was named, eventually became the most destructive fire in Colorado history in in terms of the number structures, mostly homes, that it consumed. Inside another revealer you will find 169 red dots and 25 blue dots: it’s rather upsetting to see all the red dots, as they are the structures that were destroyed, the blue being those damaged. This information was useful to the disaster assessment folks at the Red Cross in planning the long process of helping the affected people and the communities recover.
This depiction varies slightly from the original. I have added some additional information that slipped by me in the heat of the moment, such as the airport from which the air support was operating, as well as some various community resources: the justice center, library, Humane Society, etc. that played a role in the incident. I have also removed some information (mainly addresses and shelters) to protect privacy. Lastly GeoEye, a satellite imagery company released a free high resolution satellite image of the Gold Hill area after the fire, of which a part has been added, in yet another revealer, so you can compare the scene before and after the devastation.
My heart goes out to anyone affected by wildfire and I mean no disrespect by depicting this tragic scenario. It is my belief that by sharing this depiction others will be better prepared to create a common operating picture that assists in all phases of a disaster – mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. I am honored that this depiction has assisted in this incident and has generated such response. I am also amazed that, nearly two months later, the shelf-life has yet to run out. People involved in the recovery process are still showing interest in using it. That is why I offer it for anyone to view, use, expand upon and learn from; happy depicting!
Depiction of the Week: Fourmile Fire
Exercises Gaining Popularity
Oct 21st
The Disaster Resource Guide Continuity e-Guide #355 released yesterday includes “Exercises Crucial for Effective Disaster Planning”. This is right in line with our thinking and our sponsorship of the Formidable Footprint Exercises. It’s great to see that this is an international trend! For more on Depiction and exercises, check out these upcoming and recent webinars:
- 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!
Depiction of the Week: Mount Rainier Hike
Oct 20th
In early September, I had the opportunity to go on a lovely, if strenuous, hike to the Golden Lakes area in Mount Rainier National Park southeast of Seattle. Along the way I took a few photographs, including a few very nice looking (if I do say so myself) panoramic images. When I got back, I wanted to compare what we had done with the imagery and maps that Depiction brings in via Quickstart.
Using the new Depiction Reader, you can take a look at the result in this week’s “Depiction of the Week,” which includes the USGS topgraphic map and elevation data, NAIP aerial imagery, the aforementioned photographs, and a GPX track we took of the hike. The most interesting thing I found in the depiction was the significant disparity between the trails marked on the USGS map (which I had taken with me) and the reality of what we hiked as shown by GPS. This explained quite a few of the “why am I not at the top/bottom yet?” questions I asked while slogging up/down the many (many) switchbacks along the trail. Next year, I’ll be bringing a printed version of this depiction along!
This depiction is a great example of how you can use Depiction to merge multiple, very different data sources into a single scenario that others can easily explore. This depiction is a hike, but this could just as easily be a post-disaster damage assessment, an event plan, or a regional tour.
Depiction of the Week: Mount Rainier Hike
Each week we’ll feature a depiction that you can open with either the Reader or the full version of Depiction. Are you a Depiction user with a Depiction you’d like to see featured? Click here to submit it.
Thoughts on Crisis Mapping
Oct 13th
Schuyler Erle, at his blog iconocla.st has a great post up with thoughts related to the International Conference on Crisis Mapping last week. We were, alas, unable to attend, but some of Shuyler’s thoughts mesh directly with what we are trying to do at Depiction, and I wanted to highlight and reflect on a couple of them.
Regarding the question of how to replicate the “miracle” of crisis mapping in Haiti during future disasters, he writes,
When relief agencies start depending on the work of the crowd, how do we ensure that the crowd shows up?
These aren’t questions with simple answers. For example, volunteer interest hinges, largely, on media attention. The tragic flooding in Pakistan this summer has adversely impacted ten times as many people as the quake in Haiti, but media attention has been far less strident, with the result that many fewer OSM volunteers have stepped up to contribute. Access to the commercial satellite imagery, which makes collaborative remote editing of OSM possible, has also been much harder to obtain, for similar reasons.
Moreover, every non-profit org, formal or ad-hoc, has to contend with volunteer fatigue. The more acute and immediate a disaster is, the easier it is to focus attention on it, which, again, has made crowdmapping Haiti far easier than Pakistan. The longer a situation wears on, the less urgency a volunteer will feel to act, and the more likely it will become that any given volunteer has other, more pressing things to do.
By the same token, casual volunteers can only be called into service so many times before they start to tune out the requests. Consequently, the “Crisis Mapping” community needs to steward its volunteer strength carefully. What criteria do we use to determine that a disaster is acute enough to warrant mounting a response?
The best way to be sure the crowd shows up regularly, and even for smaller disasters that may not currently warrant a crisis mapping response, is to make the crowd bigger. Right now, the only people who are directly involved with crisis mapping tend to be those who have access to and training for the large, complicated, expensive geospatial systems that dominate the GIS industry. Those systems are a good thing, and the experts, like Shuyler, who use them for humanitarian response are fantastic. But if your pool of volunteers consists of only these people, then there is going to be a pretty hard limit on resources.
But if you have tools that are inexpensive and easy enough to use that they extend mapping and simulation capability to everyday people, then suddenly that pool of volunteers can explode. That’s something we hope Depiction can be a part of in international crisis relief–it’s already doing that across the US, where amateur radio users, Red Cross volunteers and animal rescue teams are using it to perform basic, but vital, crisis mapping functions all the time, and few of them have any formal GIS training at all.
Shuyler goes on to describe the difficulties of Internet access, even via satellite, in a disaster area:
Point blank… any IT solution intended for use by relief workers in a disaster zone needs to work independently of the Internet. I say this, without pointing fingers, because I keep seeing humanitarian aid tools being proposed and developed by well-intended individuals and organizations — some of them *quite* large — that depend on ample network access to be of any use. Seriously, guys. Knock it off.
That same technical ingenuity needs to be put into working out how information technology can be used to coordinate humanitarian aid volunteers, both in *and* out of country, on a minimum of bandwidth, as low tech as possible.
This is another thing we feel strongly about, and it’s why Depiction is a regular old desktop application, rather than software-as-a-service or some sort of enterprise system. While it makes use of the great resources that are available online like OpenStreetMap and web services and so forth, when data is saved locally, it stays local. It functions perfectly well without the Internet–data can be manipulated, saved, imported, exported and exchanged via flash drive, local networks or carrier pigeon.
Working on low tech is also key–for years, until it recently gave up the ghost, our CEO has been running Depiction on an ancient XP laptop. As noted before, I’ve used it on just a netbook.
And, of course, if you start talking to our amateur radio users, they have lots to say on the subject of doing things when the Internet is unavailable, and many of them are using Depiction offline with tools like APRS Live, Winlink and D-STAR.
If you’d like to learn more about the capabilities of Depiction for crisis mapping, feel free to watch the webcast we did for the Crisis Mapping Network last winter, or to just download the Depiction Reader with a sample depiction or two to see what it’s all about.
Webinar for hospital and healthcare emergency managers
Jul 1st
Today’s webinar for hospital and healthcare emergency managers, “Preparing for the Unexpected Disaster”, went very well–well enough that we hope to do another, similar webinar in the future. In the meantime, you can click here to watch the recording of today’s webinar, and find key online resources as well.
