In this lesson, we will rely on our new knowledge of GIS as it is used in the four stages of emergency management to develop scenarios that can be used to inform the design of new GIS systems for emergency management. Scenarios are a key creative mechanism for evaluating system designs against the likely impacts and outcomes from a hypothetical disaster situation. You will learn about scenarios and then develop your own.
At the successful completion of Lesson 7, students should be able to:
If you have questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them at the Lesson 7 Questions and Comments Discussion in Canvas.
Lesson 7 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.
Step | Activity | Access/Directions |
---|---|---|
1 | Work through Lesson 7. | You are in the Lesson 7 online content now. The Overview page is previous to this page, and you are on the Checklist page right now. |
2 | Complete the Group Writing Assignment. | On Page 4, you will find instructions for a Group Writing Assignment focused on developing scenarios for use in GIS planning activities. You will work in a group to develop content on a page I've created in this Lesson as opposed to Canvas. |
3 | Read and Respond to the Emerging Theme topic for Lesson 7. | You will find this week's Emerging Theme topic on Page 7. Explore the material there and participate in discussion as directed. |
Besides researching previous disasters and GIS-enabled emergency management technology, an excellent way to forecast what is needed in a future GIS system is to develop scenarios. You've already had some experience with this in Lesson 3 where you wrote up a small scenario for a potential disaster event on a college campus.
In a disaster management setting, scenarios are realistic stories that describe what would happen to people, infrastructure, and the natural environment with a given set of disaster conditions. Often, scenarios are developed as part of a hazard assessment process where they can be used to predict the possible effects on a place given different types of hazard situations. Scenarios are also used to create training simulations to test preparedness measures and response plans. This latter purpose is particularly relevant for this class; we need to use scenarios to evaluate the extent to which our GIS infrastructure and analytical capabilities will actually hold up during a disaster situation.
In system design activities, scenarios can end up being quite formal in terms of their structure. For further reading on the essence of scenario-based design, check out this section from GEOG 583 [3].
A great way to understand scenarios is to read a few yourself. The US Department of Homeland Security prepared a report in 2005 that describes a wide range of potential disaster scenarios. I recommend you take a look at these scenarios [4] (3 mb, PDF). The two examples given for natural disasters are the most relevant for this course, but you may find the others valuable as well.
A completely different perspective on disaster scenarios can be seen in this planning document from Lloyd's of London [5], one of the world's largest insurance markets. Lloyd's provides additional examples of disaster scenarios here as well. [6]
Scenarios often go hand-in-hand with Tabletop exercises. Tabletop exercises are simulated response activities. Usually these are held in an extremely generic hotel ballroom, with stakeholders of all types hunkered down on their laptops. An exercise begins with a scenario description, and then a moderator provides additional information during the response activities to throw things into further chaos and test the limits of what people are prepared for. FEMA has some nice resources available [7] if you'd like to do one of these yourself. They've even made videos to simulate news reporting, although they need to be about forty times more hyperbolic to match the 24/7 news channel intensity these days.
For this lesson, I want you to focus on scenarios that include the following elements:
My hope is that you come away from this lesson with an appreciation for how scenarios can be used to develop meaningful and effective plans for GIS sytems to support emergency management activities. Having your organization frame its GIS plans according to one or more realistic disaster scenarios will help connect technology to realistic community needs.
This week we will do something a little different for our writing assignment. I would like you to work in groups to develop one of three different scenarios that focus on leverage points for the use of GIS. You will have the opportunity to imagine a realistic situation and propose different roles for GIS during the disaster. Each group has its own page in this lesson where you can edit the page content and add in your scenario.
Here are the topics and students I have assigned to each group:
*** For Fall 2017 the groups are 1) Kevin and Madelyn and 2) Diena and Paul. Please choose one of the three topics for your report. ***
Here are some criteria for developing these scenarios:
I encourage you to use commenting on each page and e-mail to coordinate your group activities and make sure that everyone in your group shares the burden of this assignment. If you don't contribute anything, your classmates will tell me about it; so be a good citizen and make solid contributions.
The pages following these instructions are blank and identified by group number (Group 1: Fall 2017 Scenario, for example).
To complete the group writing assignment, you will need to click on the "edit" tab at the top of your group's page and enter content using the editor. You can embed pictures, format sections, change colors, etc... using this editor.
To embed an image, see the figure below. First, click on the icon with the landscape on it to view the image embedding dialog.
In the next window, you should automatically be in a subdirectory called /student. There you can click the upload button at the top left and add your file. Once you upload the file, it should appear in the file list on the server, and to embed that image in your page, simply click on the filename and then the insert image button in the toolbar. This will take you back to the image properties window where you can resize the image and when you're ready, click "OK" to go back to the page editor.
I recommend you save your edits *frequently* by clicking the Submit button at the bottom of the editor page.
If you have problems editing/submitting content using the page editor, e-mail me so I can help!
I'll assign grades by group, and your grade will be based on your work's content, clarity, impact, and the degree to which your submission satisfies assignment guidelines. For each of the four 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). I define "Meets Criteria" as the degree to which your work satisifies the guidelines provided with the assignment.
Group 1 Scenario, Fall 2017
Background: A tropical storm which grows to a category 5 hurricane moves through the Atlantic Ocean into the Caribbean Sea towards Florida and the Southeastern United States. The storm approaches Puerto Rico, makes landfall and passes over eastern Puerto Rico, traveling northwest on a line between Palmas Del Mar and Bayamon. The outer storm band touches land in the vicinity of The storm makes landfall at 2310 hrs. local time on 19 AUG and departs the island, into the Atlantic at 1100 hrs. on 20 AUG. The storm band impacts Palmas Del Mar at approximately 2300 hrs. on 19 AUG 17.
Please see spreadsheet at the following link for sceenario and other information and content: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jefqyAbTSNcLHL9aomN-4MSMaltBnkl1I_zYEXJiPKs/edit?usp=sharing
Please see powerpoint at the following link for sceenario related images: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1XqrvaCnSbCuzXri6JAOqsPx8SPQ_DF6CgLcRBECNT18/edit?usp=sharing
Scenario Map:
Scenario Related Images:
Group 2 Scenario, Fall 2017
Period -1 (6 hours before event)
Hackers are constantly targeting the U.S. power grid, especially after the Great North-Eastern blackout of 2003, which leads to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 [8], but despite repeated studies and proposed legislation, Little has been done to harden the US power grid against attack. “Admiral Michael Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, testified before the U.S. Congress that China and a few other countries likely had the capability to shut down the U.S. power grid” (Council on Foreign Relations, 2017). Without warning, hackers of unknown origin could trigger a power surge cyber-bomb within the firewall targeting the power grid in the Southeast US: Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, affecting the nation’s largest power grid, leaving more than 40 million people without power, and causing a huge number of casualties. This kind of cyber-attack could severely harm the United States economy, society, and political system.
The Department of Energy (DOE) had developed a shared assistance program that would kick in during major power disruptions. The Electricity Subsector Coordinating Council (ESCC) has established a playbook (crisis management framework) to coordinate efforts to facilitate preparing for and responding to national-level disasters or threats to critical infrastructure. “ESCC is taking action on issues in three main areas: facilitating coordination with the government and other critical infrastructure sectors; improving information sharing capabilities, tools, and technologies; and enhancing resilience, response, and recovery efforts” (electricity subsector, 2017). The National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) monitors cyber activity around the clock. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has trained representatives to intervene as quickly as possible when required to identify any malicious software. Many training sessions are conducted throughout the year to focus and test capabilities of federal, state, and local emergency mangers to deal with cyber-attacks, such as FEMA Region III (FEMA, May 2017), and Cyber Guard (DOD/NSA, June 2016).
GIS location analytics are effectively used during the planning and preparedness stage to locate areas such as hospitals, trauma facilities, assisted living facilities, chemical manufacturers and similar facilities that rely on refrigeration to stabilize dangerous substances, and other facilities similarly vulnerable to power outages, to document their readiness--what generator backups they have, their fuel requirements, etc. GIS databases also locate evacuation routes and help equip them with backup power to traffic lights. Replacement equipment (e.g. transformers) are set aside at strategic locations identified through GIS location analytics in preparation for the kind of large scale grid damage, such as would be experienced in a cyber-attack to accelerate power recovery for critical facilities.
(Cyber-attack preparation, 2017)
Period 1 (first 6 hours after event)
Monday, 23rd July 2019 at 9:20 pm. Lights flicker in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida and throughout the southeast states. Transformers everywhere explode into flames, and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and other control devices are destroyed, causing a blackout across the entire South-Eastern US. People everywhere, in homes, stores, restaurants, high rise buildings, streets, and hospitals are plunged into darkness. Computers and broadband Internet service are unavailable. Gas stations can’t pump fuel. Cellular services are quickly overloaded with emergency distress calls and families and friends checking on one another’s’ safety. Without warning, unidentified hackers have penetrated the Southeast US power grid, triggering a ‘logic bomb’ previously planted to cause a power surge that knocks out electricity for more than 50 million people.
A series of procedures is set in motion, as described by the ESCC playbook (crisis management framework), that helps the energy companies, federal, state, and local organizations to establish communications, so that utility Incident Command Systems and government agencies can effectively start coordinating the response and recovery effort. The NCCIC studies and identifies the attack, while NERC representatives start communications with the utility industry to identify the hacker’s software as quickly as possible. These cyber defense efforts by the NCCIC and NERC are guided by geospatial applications that help visualize the geography of global communications and IT networks to isolate the spread of malicious software and remove it from the system, before it spreads to other segments of the national power grid.
States Blockout (Wikimedia, 2017)
Period 2 (second 6 hours after event)
Loss of street and traffic lights causes transportation to come to a standstill, while widespread public panic causes spontaneous evacuation, further contributing to transportation gridlock. Multiple fires caused by exploding transformers, people trapped in elevators, building evacuations, traffic accidents and other emergencies engage first responders. Backup generators come online to support critical facilities, where they are available, but where hospitals and care facilities are without generator power, patients must be evacuated. Emergency management facilities without generators are rendered ‘blind’ without electricity to support IT and communications resources.
As the situation develops, situational awareness in the form of identifying locations both of available resources and areas of need would be an appropriate application for GIS support. A map application laying out locations of critical facilities, including the current state of those facilities (e.g. generator supported or without power), and matching resource availability to immediate needs (e.g. identifying trauma facilities still in operation to which ambulances can deliver injured) would be an important first step. The same application would directly support the response by mapping EOC and other EM facilities still in operation so that the response effort could be efficiently redistributed to generator-supported facilities. Recovering the EM capabilities for response in this way would be the first order of business. This might be an area for pre-planning of system resiliency by, for example, establishing cloud-based GIS resources and other measures designed to protect against loss of critical EM resources to such a massive power outage.
Traffic in Times Square during a massive power outage on August 14th, 2003. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, 2017)
Period 3 (third 6 hours after event)
Public panic continues to grow, but as first responders get the immediate situation under control, resources are deployed to quell the panic and provide for immediate needs. Cities are divided into smaller divisions (three blocks), and first responder teams are assigned to start moving house-to-house, evacuating and aiding individuals with clean water and medications, using cellphone mapping applications to guide the effort.
Meanwhile, utility companies across the country mobilize for mutual assistance, and the remaining operational EOCs must plan logistics for mutual assistance resources. Given the scope of damage to power distribution infrastructure, it can be assumed power recovery will take considerable time. Under these circumstances, keeping generators supporting critical facilities, with life-saving/threatening responsibilities, supplied with fuel to continue operation is paramount. Likewise, supporting first responder access and mobility across the transportation system is equally important. Between the loss of traffic control devices, spontaneous mass evacuation from the area, and the attendant vehicular accidents, routing of fuel tankers and emergency vehicles would be critical.
A GIS application for identifying and tracking transportation blockages and congestion and routing around them, as well as routing emergency vehicles and tow trucks to clear critical routes and junctions, could address the needs of emergency response during this period and going forward. The application could include real-time reporting from social media sources, and remote sensing imagery, both aerial and satellite, for situation awareness, converting this data into network analysis barriers and impedances for analyzing and recommending routes to first responders.
Period 4 (after 18 hours)
Mutual assistance crews from the Northeast, Midwest, and Central South start to roll into the Southeast, but are impeded by increasing transportation gridlock. Local Damage Assessment teams are also impeded by transportation gridlock, and location and assessment of damage slows to a crawl. Local recovery crews are largely confined to staging areas due to lack of knowledge about damage locations and equipment recovery requirements. NCCIC, and NERC engineers have identified the software, and used government-developed tools to eliminate the cyber threat. GIS systems at operational EOCs help relocate EOC resources, and establish shelters to which power can be supplied.
As recovery of the power grid kicks in to high gear, the advanced routing capabilities mentioned above would need to be integrated with workforce management systems to manage and track individual damage assessment (DA) teams and work crews, and to efficiently convert damage reports into accurate work orders and specialized crew dispatch. These systems must pick up where Outage Management Systems (OMSs) and Asset Management Systems leave off, geo-enabling asset information and OMS damage detection to efficiently guide the DA teams to the most likely areas of need, bundling prospective damage sites into optimal routes for dispatching the teams. Once there, geospatial mobile apps assist DA teams in locating and documenting the damage, including replacement equipment and skill requirements, preferably with capabilities to record images/video, or even for remote expert assistance via smart glasses or similar technology. Similarly, assessed damage needs to be converted into work orders and dispatched through a map-enabled work management system that can track crew availability, assign work orders to the nearest available crews, provide the crews with routing instructions, and tracking work performance to know when each crew is available again.
Dragonfly’s activities (Symantec, 2017)
Cyber-attack workflow (Business, Data Security and Protection, malware, security, Technology, viruses, 30 Aug, 2017, 2017)
References:
AP Photo/Gregory Bull (2017). Traffic in Times Square during a massive power outage on August 14th, 2003.. [image] Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/city-war-games-the-ultimate-cyber-attack-on-east-coast-us-1.2958494 [9] [Accessed 3 Oct. 2017].
Business, Data Security and Protection, malware, security, Technology, viruses, 30 Aug, 2017 (2017). cyber-attack workflow. [image] Available at: http://www.northstarbusinessessentials.com/nist-security-framework/ [10] [Accessed 3 Oct. 2017].
Council on Foreign Relations. (2017). A Cyberattack on the U.S. Power Grid. [online] Available at: https://www.cfr.org/report/cyberattack-us-power-grid [11] [Accessed 1 Oct. 2017].
Cyber-attack preparation. (2017). [image] Available at: http://www.americatalks.com/news/trump-orders-preparation-for-electric-grid-cyber-attacks/ [12] [Accessed 3 Oct. 2017].
Ed Goings , KPMG (2017). Protecting against external attacks doesn’t reduce the risk of internal breaches, which can be just as damaging. [image] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kpmg/2017/05/24/a-rapid-response-weapon-against-cyber-attacks/#601581f15544 [13] [Accessed 3 Oct. 2017].
electricity subsector. (2017). ESCC. [online] Available at: http://www.electricitysubsector.org/ESCCInitiatives.pdf [14] [Accessed 2 Oct. 2017].
Symantec (2017). Dragonfly’s activities. [image] Available at: https://www.hackread.com/hackers-have-reportedly-infiltrated-the-us-power-grids [15] [Accessed 3 Oct. 2017].
Wikimedia (2017). blockout. [image] Available at: http://www.offthegridnews.com/grid-threats/new-report-us-power-grid-attacked-every-4-days-nationwide-blackout-more-likely-than-we-thought [16] [Accessed 3 Oct. 2017].
In the recent past, there have been significant advances in automated tools for extracting place information from news articles and other text media. This led to a wave of map mashups that allowed for news stories to be browsed using a map. Since those earlier efforts, social media data sources have become ubiquitous, and while similar methods can be used to extract and represent places mentioned in social media reports like Tweets, there are also a lot of challenges we have yet to overcome to make these datasets truly useful in a crisis situation.
A few of the challenges associated with mapping information from social media are:
Here at Penn State, we've been engaged in research to develop new tools for foraging through and visualizing geographic information coming from social media reports. The SensePlace2 [17] project harvests tweets that include disaster-related keywords. From these tweets, we then extract place names and geocode them (along with other named entities, such as people, organizations, and resources). Also check out the recently released SensePlace3 [18].
Because so many social media sources now feature API access to their data feeds, new map mashups are now possible that can integrate multiple forms of social media with other geospatial data. Esri maintains a few so-called "Public Information Maps" that show current weather mashed-up with social media streams. The example below is just one of them. If you click the "Social" button at the upper-right of the public information map and login to your Twitter account, you can have it show what it believes are relevant tweets. This uses the location feature that some (very few, it turns out [19]) enable on their devices when they use Twitter.
This week, I'll be reading each of your term project drafts and providing my feedback. So, for now, you can relax a little about your project and focus on the rest of this lesson.
This week, we have explored how scenarios can be used to predict and plan for how GIS can be used for emergency management situations. Scenarios are stories developed around a hypothetical disaster situation, and they are used quite commonly in planning activities as a way to predict what will happen in a real situation.
You have worked with your classmates in this lesson to develop your own scenarios to see for yourself how scenario-based planning works. I hope you found it valuable to attempt this task with your colleagues. Most people who are charged with the task of planning a GIS for emergency management will not be working on that task alone, so the challenges posed by group work in this situation are quite relevant.
Scenarios are not easy to pin down. There are no universal rules as to what they should or should not include, and there are no automated tools available yet that can generate them. Scenario writing requires the synthesis of multiple types of knowledge, and, ultimately, it demands a fair bit of creativity on behalf of the author(s).
Next, we will apply what we have learned so far about the dimensions of emergency management and ways to plan GIS systems to support emergency management tasks. In the next lesson, we will work together on a case study research project to understand how GIS was used in mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery from a recent disaster.
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 7 Questions and Comments 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?
Links
[1] http://www1.nyc.gov/site/whatifnyc/index.page
[2] http://www1.nyc.gov/site/whatifnyc/competition/disaster-scenario.page
[3] http://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog583/node/7
[4] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog588/files/file/NationalPlanningScenariosApril2005.pdf
[5] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog588/files/file/RDS_Scenario_Specification_January_2013.pdf
[6] http://www.lloyds.com/the-market/tools-and-resources/research/exposure-management/realistic-disaster-scenarios
[7] http://www.fema.gov/media-library/assets/documents/26845
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005
[9] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/financial-services/city-war-games-the-ultimate-cyber-attack-on-east-coast-us-1.2958494
[10] http://www.northstarbusinessessentials.com/nist-security-framework/
[11] https://www.cfr.org/report/cyberattack-us-power-grid
[12] http://www.americatalks.com/news/trump-orders-preparation-for-electric-grid-cyber-attacks/
[13] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kpmg/2017/05/24/a-rapid-response-weapon-against-cyber-attacks/#601581f15544
[14] http://www.electricitysubsector.org/ESCCInitiatives.pdf
[15] https://www.hackread.com/hackers-have-reportedly-infiltrated-the-us-power-grids
[16] http://www.offthegridnews.com/grid-threats/new-report-us-power-grid-attacked-every-4-days-nationwide-blackout-more-likely-than-we-thought
[17] https://www.geovista.psu.edu/SensePlace2/
[18] https://www.geovista.psu.edu/SensePlace3/lite/
[19] http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p6
[20] http://www.esri.com/services/disaster-response/severe-weather/latest-news-map
[21] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Sands_Beach