Published on GEOG 588: Planning GIS for Emergency Management D7 Upgrade (https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588)

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Lesson 4: Preparedness

Lesson 4 Overview

A contraflow map shows available evacuation routes for the New Orleans region during Hurricane emergencies.

In this lesson, we will shift focus from vulnerability assessment to the next stage of emergency management, preparedness. You will read about ways in which GIS can be used to target mitigation and evacuation efforts to reduce the impact of forecast disasters. Then, you will respond to one of the readings with a written critique. For your term project, you will develop a detailed outline to help guide your progress.

Objectives

At the successful completion of Lesson 4, students should be able to:

  • explain how GIS is used in disaster preparedness;
  • complete an outline for your term project report;
  • write a short critique of a journal article;
  • describe and discuss the emerging technology trend of map mashups and responsive design.

Questions?

If you have questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them in the Lesson 4 Questions and Comments Discussion in Canvas.

Checklist

Lesson 4 is one week in length. Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates. To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below. You may find it useful to print this page out first so that you can follow along with the directions.

Steps for Completing Lesson 4

Step Activity Access/Directions
1 Work through Lesson 4. You are in the Lesson 4 online content now. The Overview page is previous to this page, and you are on the Checklist page right now.
2 Complete the Lesson 4 Reading Assignment. The Lesson 4 Reading Assignment can be found on Page 4. Make sure that you respond with a comment in Canvas to the prompt for the 1994 Mondschein article.
3 Read and respond to the Lesson 4 Emerging Theme. This week's Emerging Theme can be found on Page 5. You'll need to read the material there and participate in discussion as directed.
4 Write an outline for your Term Project. On Page 6, you will find instructions on how to create an outline for your Term Project. Submit your outline to the dropbox I've created for it in Canvas when you're ready.
5 Complete the Lesson 4 Writing Assignment. The Lesson 4 Writing Assignment is on Page 7. You will complete a critique of your readings from this week. It will be no longer than 400 words, and you will submit it to the dropbox I've created for it in Canvas.

 

Disaster Preparedness

An Ounce of Preparation...

...is worth a pound of cure, right? Often disaster situations do not present themselves with substantial warning. Some events, like earthquakes or terror attacks occur with little or no advanced warning. Other events, like hurricanes or tsunamis may allow for some substantial amount of time (ranging from an hour or two in the case of a tsunami to several days in the case of a hurricane) to prepare for the initial impact. No matter what the type of event, there are ways we can prepare by taking advantage of GIS capabilities.

Scenario-based Exercises

A highly regarded method for preparing for disasters involves the use of scenarios to conduct realistic exercises to simulate a crisis situation. For disasters that provide no advanced warning, this may be the only way to really prepare in advance. We'll go in depth on designing scenarios later on in Lesson 7, but for now you may want to review this short article describing how Montana has used exercises to prepare.

For Further Reading

Take a look at this ArcNews article [1] on an exercise carried out in Montana designed to simulate a public health crisis. Many of the tools and technologies seem very out of date now - notice how this scenario has nothing at all about the use of mobile devices or receiving social media streams. This was only 10 years ago!

Simulating Disasters in GIS

GIS can support a key element of disaster preparation through computational simulation and modeling. A wide array of specialized modeling software extensions for ArcGIS are available. This software enables users to tweak disaster parameters and simulate damage patterns due to storms, earthquakes, disease outbreaks, and fires.

The output of these models can be viewed in static maps or interactive web tools. Some real-time modeling capabilities exist for emergency managers to test various parameters and visualize their potential impact, but few of these systems are available for free to the general public (very unfortunate!). The Pacific Disaster Center [2] in Hawaii does quite a lot of work on modeling and visualizing model outputs for disaster scenarios. One example of their work can be found here, in a collection of scenarios on potential earthquakes in various locations on the Hawaiian islands. The cartography here makes me cringe a lot, but the underlying data is what's important. [3]

One publicly available resource is provided by the USGS in the form of their Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response (PAGER [4]) system. PAGER provides rapid reporting on the potential impacts of recent earthquakes on human life and structures in easy-to-consume reports and maps.

The USGS PAGER [5] system provides reports within 30 minutes to estimate the impact of recent earthquakes around the world. These reports can be used by emergency managers in the immediate aftermath to begin making decisons.

Real-Time Situation Assessment

While many sophisticated methods for modeling disaster impacts aren't yet publicly available in web tools, there are in fact a very large range of options now for free platforms used to evaluate and monitor a situation in progress. The Pacific Disaster Center's Global Hazards Atlas [6] is one such system.

The Global Hazards Atlas [6], created by the Pacific Disaster Center, provides real-time monitoring for emergency situations in the Pacific Rim. Its tools allow emergency managers to explore historical data trends in the context of current events.

 

Reading Assignment

The readings for this week focus on the second key component of emergency management, preparedness. You will read a short chapter in your text and two papers that address different aspects of GIS applied to preparedness.

As you read, it is important to read critically and not necessarily accept what you read at face value, even if it appears in a peer-reviewed journal. Many of the course assignments are aimed at helping you build the skills to assess published reports on GIS technology objectively and critically. There are multiple perspectives from which to critically assess what you read. No papers can cover all issues and no author is all-knowing; thus, it is likely that you know something relevant that the author does not (or that he/she did not consider relevant, but that is relevant from your perspective). Methods of data processing and analysis that might be acceptable in one discipline may be at odds with established methods in another discipline, so you will find disagreement among authors about what methods are “right.” People make mistakes (in their original conceptualization of a problem, in carrying out work, and in interpreting the results) – and your practical experience and/or solid grounding in GIS may give you special insight to identify these mistakes. In many cases, the authors may have limited practical knowledge, thus may completely ignore issues that are critical in a real world context.

  1. From "GIS for Disaster Management": Chapter 5 - Geographic Information Systems and Disaster Planning and Preparedness (pp. 151-182)

    This chapter focuses on the various ways preparation can be characterized in the context of GIS, as well as some of the key methods by which geospatial tools can be used to support near-term preparation when we know a disaster is about to strike.

    THINK ABOUT

    What are some of the specific ways in which preparedness is different from mitigation? You might consider this from the perspective presented by text author or (more interestingly) from the perspective of a GIS manager in a state Emergency Operations Center, from the perspective of a local regional government deciding whether to invest in GIS, or from the point of view of a citizen who expects service from their government. How might GIS activities to support preparedness differ for different kinds of emergencies – what are examples of different kinds of emergencies in which preparedness activities would differ?

  2. Read: Mondschein, L. G. 1994, The role of spatial information systems in environmental emergency management [7]. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 45(9), 678-685.

    The focus of this paper is on the use of geographic information by environmental managers and emergency responders. While this paper is crazy old now (I was an undergraduate), it introduces several issues that remain relevant. Among these are the importance of understanding relevant national, state, and local laws that relate to emergency management and recognizing that many of the users of geospatial (and other) information technology in crisis situations will not be trained to use GIS.

    RESPOND

    How does this characterization of the situation in 1994 compare to the situation today … which issues that are raised in the paper have been addressed and which issue remain important? What are the specific implications of the ideas expressed for preparedness?

  3. Read: Amram, O., Schuurman, N., Hameed, S. M. 2011, Mass Casualty Modelling: A Spatial Tool to Support Triage Decision Making [8]. International Journal of Health Geographics, 10(40).

    This paper presents an approach to modelling the ability to move casualties in an urban environment to appropriate hospitals. The authors show how they can use road network and hospital data in a web interface to identify the location of a large number of casualties and then find the most efficient way to transport those people to available health facilities.

    THINK ABOUT

    The concepts and the system described were developed and applied in Canada – would anything about this need to be altered to support crisis management work in the U.S. (or other countries)? The focus here is on transporting casualties to hospitals without actually trying to model impacts from the event that causes those casualties in the first place, so what would differ if you wanted to apply this basic strategy to preparedness in the context of a flood or urban toxic chemical release?

 

Emerging Theme: Map Mashups and Responsive Design

Map Mashups

When this class was taught for the first time in 2008, the importance of map mashups [9] in emergency management contexts was somewhat limited. At that time, it was possible to create simple mashups, but we were mostly talking about the placement of simple pin icons on generic basemaps. Today, we've got vastly more sophisticated examples, many of which are designed around emergency management tasks quite specifically.

A fundamental principle behind mashups, which causes them to be different than all other web maps, is that they're based on an amalgamation of data sources and mapping technologies. They are the sum of multiple parts, some of which may have never been intended to work together originally. With relatively little programming expertise, you may be able to manipulate the way a particular web map works through its Application Programming Interface (API). Because so many static and streaming geospatial data sources are now available in formats that are broadly interoperable, you can begin to blend together (mashup!) data with maps very quickly today.

In the context of Emergency Management, mashups are now extremely common. Mapping providers like Google actively promote the rapid development of mashups for crises as they emerge, as shown in the example below from Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Check out Google's Superstorm Sandy crisis map [10] yourself, and notice how links to data sources are prominently displayed - this encourages further mashups to spin off from the original. Click on the "layers" tab in the interface at the top right to get a list of available data sources. You may have to zoom in to see some of them in full detail.

Google's Superstorm Sandy crisis map [10] mashup shows how map data can be brought together quickly to support emergency management and promote information dissemination to the public.

Responsive Design

Another change in recent years has been the rise and ubiquity of mobile devices for accessing real-time information. While these platforms provide a lot of interesting opportunities for geospatial professionals to develop new applications, they also pose a lot of challenges to how we're presenting maps and geospatial data. The mashup you just reviewed about Sandy has no mobile-specific version. What you see is what you get, on whatever device you view it with.

The problem area of web design to support a wide range of possible screen sizes and resolutions has coalesced today around the concept of Responsive Design [11]. Web pages designed to be responsive will adapt their layout on-the-fly to whatever screen size and resolution is available. This means you design your pages from the ground-up to work at several different breakpoints [12]; desktop monitor, tablet, and phone sizes for example.

Have a look at these two video presentation by Luke Wroblewski [13]. The first one briefly describes how responsive design works, and the second video shows how principles of responsive design were used to revise an app for stormchasing called Tweester. The second video is part of a video series for Intel about designing for Ultrabooks (and is a few years old), and while it has a smidge of marketing-speak embedded as a result, the overall message is very well stated.

Deliverables for this week's emerging theme

  • Post a comment that describes what Emergency Management applications you think stand to benefit from mashups that incorporate responsive design principles. What will be the toughest things to make responsive, and what will be easy to support?
  • Then, I'd like you to offer additional insight, critique, a counter-example, or something else constructive in response to one of your colleagues' posts.
  • Brownie points for linking to other technology demos, pictures, blog posts, etc... that you've found to enrich your posts so that we may all benefit.

Note: Post your deliverable in the Lesson 4 Emerging Themes Discussion Forum in Canvas [14].

 

Term Project - Create an Outline

This week, you need to compile and submit an outline for your term project paper. By now, you've received my feedback on your project abstract and you had some time last week to collect some background information.

Outline Description

A good outline will help you complete your term project as efficiently as possible. I like working with an outline because then I know the gaps that I need to fill. It's also an excellent way of narrowing what your paper will cover given a specific word count constraint.

Your outline should:

  • identify major sections and subsections of your paper;
  • organize sections in a logical flow that guides the reader from start to finish;
  • reflect the limitations you have on word count for the final product (you won't be able to have dozens of sections covering every possible topic).

I'll leave it up to you to decide how much detail your outline includes beyond section and subsection headings. I like to add short statements for the key ideas I will cover in each subsection; that way I know exactly what I must cover to complete the paper.

Outline Submittal Instructions

When you're finished with this assignment, submit your outline to the dropbox I've created for it in Canvas.

Save your files in the following format:

L4_tp_firstinitialLastName.doc (or .jpg or .pdf or .tiff).

For example, my file would be named "L4_tp_rmbeaty.doc" - This naming convention is important, as it will help me make sure I match each submission with the right student.

Submit your assignment to the Term Project: Outline dropbox in Canvas. See our Canvas Course Calendar for specific due dates.

Outline Grading Criteria

For this assignment, I will assign grades with the following rubric. For each of the three main criteria, I will assign points on a scale from 1-5, with 5 being excellent and 1 being very poor. I define "Impact" as the strength and logic of the arguments and analytical insights you provide with your writing. I define "Content" as the level of understanding and knowledge of relevant topics you demonstrate with your writing. I define "Clarity" as the readability and organization of your writing (including formatting and appropriate graphic design where applicable).

Impact, Content, Clarity, Meets Criteria: 5 = Excel., 4 = VG, 3 = Satis., 2 = Poor, 1 = V. Poor

Writing Assignment

Lesson 4 Writing Assignment Description

The chapter from your book is matched with two journal papers that focus on different GIS for emergency management situations that include preparedness components. Your written deliverable for this week’s lesson (beyond what you write for the class participation section) is to produce a brief (no more than 400 words) critical assessment of the paper by Amram and colleagues [8].

The critical assessment should begin with a one-two sentence summary of the authors’ goals in the project reported. Then, in 2-4 paragraphs, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the work reported. Consider the following issues:

  • The most important contribution that the paper makes to understanding the role of GIS in emergency management (what do we know now that we did not know before this work?)
  • Critical aspects of the methods applied and/or decisions made about those methods that make the work something that others should emulate (e.g., things that they considered that, if they had been ignored, would make the conclusions unreliable or invalid).
  • Flaws that you see in the work reported (these might be in methods developed, in the way they were applied, or in the interpretations that the authors make about applicability of their results).

Lesson 4 Writing Assignment Submission Instructions

Save your files in the following format:

L4_assign4_firstinitialLastName.doc (or .jpg or .pdf or .tiff).

For example, my file would be named "L4_assign4_rmbeaty.doc" - This naming convention is important, as it will help me make sure I match each submission with the right student.

Submit your assignment to the Lesson 4 Writing Assignment dropbox in Canvas. See our Canvas course calendar for specific due dates.

Lesson 4 Writing Assignment Grading Criteria

For this assignment, I will assign grades with the following rubric. For each of the three main criteria, I will assign points on a scale from 1-5, with 5 being excellent and 1 being very poor. I define "Impact" as the strength and logic of the arguments and analytical insights you provide with your writing. I define "Content" as the level of understanding and knowledge of relevant topics you demonstrate with your writing. I define "Clarity" as the readability and organization of your writing (including formatting and appropriate graphic design where applicable).

Impact, Content, Clarity: 5 = Excellent, 4 = Very Good, 3 = Satisfactory, 2 = Poor, 1 = Very Poor

Summary

This week, we focused on how GIS can be used to prepare for a disaster. Different disasters present different types of opportunities for preparation - some, like terror attacks or earthquakes provide little or no warning time at all. Others, like hurricanes or other severe storms, may offer a window of opportunity where GIS can be used to coordinate evacuations and other types of preparation efforts (sandbagging levees, for example).

One way to prepare for disasters that offer little or no warning is to develop spatial computational models of disaster impacts and use a GIS to run simulations of hypothetical emergency situations. In this lesson, we looked at how the USGS uses PAGER to quickly estimate damage from earthquakes. When planning a GIS system for emergency management, it may be very useful to allocate time and resources toward disaster modeling efforts to simulate situations that present very little advanced warning.

In the next lesson, we will shift our attention to the response phase of emergency management. In the immediate time following a disaster, GIS will be called upon to develop a situational picture and to allocate first responder resources. In lesson 5, we will delve into a wide variety of challenges that are associated with disaster response and GIS.

Tell us about it!

If there is anything in the lesson materials that you would like to comment on or add to, feel free to post your thoughts in the Lesson 4 Comments and Questions Discussion in Canvas. For example, what did you have the most trouble with in this lesson? Was there anything useful here that you'd like to try in your own work?

 


Source URL: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/l4.html

Links
[1] http://home.gcs-research.net/files/G21449_AN_DisasterPrep_rep.pdf
[2] http://www.pdc.org/solutions/services/modeling-and-visualization/
[3] http://www.pdc.org/resources/hawaii-disaster-info/hawaii-hazus-atlas/
[4] http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/pager/
[5] http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10006g7d#executive
[6] http://atlas.pdc.org/atlas/
[7] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog588/files/file/Mondschein_1994.pdf
[8] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog588/files/file/Amram_etal_2011.pdf
[9] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog863/
[10] http://google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy
[11] http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/
[12] http://alistapart.com/article/designing-for-breakpoints
[13] http://www.lukew.com/ff/
[14] http://psu.instructure.com