GIS Tracks a Moving Target

August 1, 2001 By Bill McGarigle

A pilot flying over the edge of a wildfire in Southern California concentrates on keeping the helicopter over the advancing line of flames 50 feet below. In the passenger seat, an observer watches for hazards -- power lines, aerial tankers, other helicopters. In the back seat, a fire management officer with a pocket-sized computer/GPS system enters the locations of ground units, burning and threatened structures and logging roads. The input data appear on the display as color-coded symbols, along with the line of fire and the current position of the helicopter. As the craft reaches its starting point on the perimeter, the map line closes to form a polygon. With the perimeter completed, the crew, one of several tactical GIS teams, returns to the situation analysis mapping center (SAMC) where the data is loaded directly into a computer and printed out on maps.

Tactical Mapping

At the SAMC, incident commanders go over the new map, assess the fires current speed and direction, the topography of the area it is moving into and the location of access roads. The map will assist them in making strategic decisions -- deployment of ground and air resources, structures to be saved and areas to be evacuated.

Scenarios similar to this took place during the Viejas wildfire that struck the mountainous region of San Diego County, Calif., in January 2001. Fanned by 65 mph winds, the fire burned 10,353 acres of the Cleveland National Forest, destroyed homes and forced the evacuation of hundreds of residents. It took 2,000 firefighters, 225 engine companies and several air tankers six days to control the fire.

GIS had a key role in suppressing the Viejas fire, according to Tom Patterson, fire management officer at Joshua Tree National Park in California. "The information we were providing to incident commanders in near realtime was critical for tactical decisions," said Patterson, who was a member of the tactical mapping team for the Viejas fire.

Maps are essential tools in fighting wildfires. They provide incident commanders with the information needed to deploy resources, track the speed, direction and perimeter of the fire, assure the safety of firefighters and plan evacuation routes. Given the rapidly changing conditions associated with this type of fire, the need for up-to-date topographic and planimetric information about an area is especially critical for resource deployment in the early stages. "Knowing where your resources are is the key to safety during any fire suppression activity," Patterson said.

In the past, just collecting the data to develop a map of a fire area could take several days. By then, a fire could have progressed beyond the area covered by the data. Today, GIS units turn out area maps in minutes. Tactical GIS teams collect fire perimeter data and transmit it to a SAMC in realtime, or have it in the hands of incident commanders within a couple of hours. For the past decade, standard equipment for the task has been laptops, separate GPS receivers and cell phones, along with cables, adapters and spare batteries. Managing all this while bouncing around in a helicopter has never been easy, particularly while observing and entering data about a fast-moving fire.

New Technologies Measure Up

In the Viejas fire, teams used ArcPad, an intuitive GIS, running on Compaqs iPAQ and Hewlett Packards Journado personal digital assistants. Each was cabled to a Garmin GPS III Plus receiver. According to Patterson, the combined package weighed one pound and fit into the pocket of a flight suit.

Patterson said Viejas was the first time the group had mapped a fire using PDAs. "The ArcPad software integrates both mapping and GPS functions so that position information is automatically displayed as moving crosshairs on an actual map, rather than as numerical coordinates. We could zoom in on the map and see our position very clearly

PREV 1 | 2 NEXT

You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/GIS-Tracks-a-Moving-Target.html

| More

Comments

Add Your Comment

Name *

Comment *

You are solely responsible for the content of your comments. We reserve the right to remove comments that are considered profane, vulgar, obscene, factually inaccurate, off-topic, or considered a personal attack.

Latest From Justice and Public Safety

GovTech Papers and Case Studies View Library

Follow @govtechnews

Government Best Practices

Accelerate and Protect Your eLearning Initiatives With Akamai’s Cloud Based Intelligent Platform

IDC: Delivering Customer Value with Enterprise Flash Deployments

The Legacy Play

Five Myths of Cloud Computing

Secure Access to Your Data in a Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) World

Disaster Recovery

Big Data, Big Promise

Protecting Government and Citizen Data

Virtualizing the Government Desktop

Service Virtualization: Streamlining Development of Complex Applications

Uncovering Costs in Towing and Impound Services

Mobile Government: Getting your employees the right tools for the job

Secure Mobile Productivity

Collaborative Video Solutions in Healthcare

Collaborative Justice: Transforming Criminal Justice Services Through Unified Collaboration

Most Viewed

This Section | Whole Site

Most Commented

Cellphone Blocking Moves Ahead in California Prisons

"It's funny that the state of California would pay millions for something that they could get for fre"
Crime Scene Investigation

"This information is almost identical to the information on HDS in my Introduction to Criminal Justic"

Collaboration for the Public Sector

Collaborative Justice: Transforming Criminal Justice Services Through Unified Collaboration
This issue brief examines video collaboration in every stage of the human justice process, demonstrating how this technology can not only make services more efficient, affordable, and accessible.