GIS assist with Emergency Preparedness

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2018

Hurricane Irma left a trail of devastation throughout DeKalb County in 2017 that brought flooding, downed trees and wires leaving one-third of the County without power. DeKalb County Emergency Management Agency in conjunction with our First Responders, Sanitation, Roads & Drainage, GIS and a host of other local agencies worked around the clock to ensure the safety of DeKalb Citizens. After a successful team operation of restoring the County back to normal, it was time to debrief and discuss ways to improve for the next natural disaster. The GIS Department then began to work on the implementation of Intermedix’s ArcGIS Extension for WebEOC which allows us to seamlessly integrate the WebEOC platform into our existing enterprise GIS environment. As new emergency incident records are added and modified in WebEOC, they are simultaneously updated as geographic features in ArcGIS Online. This greatly supplements the capabilities of WebEOC by allowing us to utilize ESRI products and data sources to visualize and manage the data during emergency response events. These include web maps and dashboards for dynamic visualization, as well as mobile data collection apps that allow responders to add and update WebEOC incident data in the field in real-time. Additional data sources not available in WebEOC can also be incorporated for better analysis and visualization. These supplementary components provide an invaluable resource to DeKalb County’s first responders by extending the capabilities of WebEOC to help better manage resources and facilitate timely decision making during the event of a crisis.