Published by Public Technology Institute (PTI) and the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA), "Geospatial Systems That Support Emergency and Disaster Operations: A Case Study Guide for Local Government and Utility First Responders" is available until February 28, 2009 at no charge from the PTI (www.pti.org) and GITA (www.gita.org) Web sites. After February 28 the publication will be available for a fee.
During large scale emergency and disaster events, first responders are counted upon to minimize injury and loss of life. One of the keys to making first responders as effective as possible is to provide them with the high quality information and intelligence they require, when and where it is needed.
The publication contains case studies from 10 local governments that highlight:
- How geospatial-based systems and data allow first responders to easily and reliably access critical information pre-incident, on-route and on-scene
- How these systems are used to rapidly access information in central databases, or from a variety of remote sensing systems for transmission to the field in support of emergency operations
- How these systems support the collection of information by first responders at the incident scene in ways that allow it to be rapidly transmitted to operations centers for assembly, analysis and distribution to the response community, as well as post-event analysis
- How support systems permit first responders from different organizations to stay in touch with one another and to coordinate their field activities.
