xAnalytica

The online publication Emergency Management hosted a webinar on the use of Google tools within emergency management, with speakers from Google and NOAA. The presentation stressed that despite temporary outages, the Internet is quite robust and available during disasters, and since Google’s familiarity and reliability make people look to Google for information during a crisis, it is the default platform for emergency management and information dissemination. A quick overview of this webinar:

• 00:00 Introducing the “Whole Community” disaster response – Paul Wormell (Emergency Management)
• 07:10 Google’s role in crisis response – Meryl Stone (Google).
• 12:20 The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), a version of XML used by NOAA, USGS, and Google to format disaster messaging with tags defining the type and severity of an event – Michael Gerber (National Weather Service).
• 24:40 USGS Earthquake data on Google.org using CAP- Meryl Stone
• 29:16 Google’s role in Crisis Mapping – Sean Maday (Google).
• 36:00 Introducing GoogleEarth Portable, which downloads a small region of GoogleEarth data for use offline – Sean Maday (Google).
• 40:15 Key messages: Information providers should to publish their data in CAP; information providers should prepare their servers for high demand during crisis; agencies should create and share tools ahead of time; and please partner with Google Earth – Sean Maday.
• 42:40 Closing – Paul Wormell, who notes that there isn’t time during a disaster to learn new software or create a new database, so preparedness and familiarity are important.
• 45:00 Q&A: CrisisCamp; agencies using CAP, fusion tables and GoogleEarth Builder; use cases.

A website currently using CAP is Google Public Alerts, a GoogleMap mashup of NOAA, NWS, and USGS public alerts. Unlike most mashups, it includes hyperlinks that allow users to bore down for more information.

-ddw

I have often repeated the truism that successful disaster management begins with a map, and am always searching for – and touting – useful collections of maps. One such collection is from Global Data Vault, a data backup and recovery service, who has assembled a collection of US maps showing risk for earthquakes, floods, tonados, and more. Global Data Vault also provides a clickable Disaster Map Database summarizing Federal disaster declarations, by county, for the northern MidWestern and Northeastern US. The level of detail and the historical nature of these maps might not make them useful for disaster response, but they would be useful for identifying risks when creating a disaster plan or when teaching a class in emergency preparedness.

While I always applaud free online sources of data, they are often missing the data source or a discussion of how to interpret the data. For example, the first map in the Data Vault series has no source, but looks a lot like the USGS simplified seismic hazard map for the United States, contoured for the percent g (gravitational acceleration, or g-force) one would experience during ground shaking – that is, dark red areas on the map are regions where one might see an earthquake that would feel like over 1/3 of a g. The USGS site provides that necessary interpretation, allowing the user to synthesize more knowledge from the presented information.

-ddw