GIS: Fires, Hurricanes Prove No Match for GIS
GIS is put to use by emergency response personnel to tackle natural disasters in Alaska and North Carolina.
By David Wagman

When the Crooked Creek fire blew up last June at a logging site near Ninikchik, Alaska, about 100 miles southwest of Anchorage, Chris Clough, GIS technician with the Kenai Peninsula Borough GIS Department, asked how he could help.
      Officials with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources Division of Forestry, responsible for coordinating wildland fire fighting efforts, were in the midst of developing an evacuation plan for people near the fire. When Clough asked how he could help, officials told him they needed to pinpoint structures in and around the fire where people might be living.
      Using GIS software of Graphic Data Systems Corp., Englewood, Colo., Clough produced maps showing all land parcels in the vicinity and the dollar value of their improvements. The portion of the borough affected by the fire is dotted with hundreds of cabins, most of which are used by winter sports enthusiasts, and could be readily identified using the valuation data. Armed with precise parcel information, fire management officials quickly developed an evacuation plan, which, thankfully, was not needed.
      Two months later and a continent away, storm trackers watched as Hurricane Fran rapidly approached the North Carolina coast. The day before the storm made landfall, management personnel at the city of Raleigh, N.C., began to prepare for the worst. On Thursday, Sept. 5, Fran struck North Carolina and Raleigh with ferocity. Within a few hours the city's 911 Command Center was jammed with calls reporting fallen trees, downed power lines and other emergencies. To respond quickly and effectively, city personnel needed to pinpoint the exact location of damaged power lines, flooded streets and fallen trees.
      Using GIS software from GDS Corp., Colleen Sharpe, Raleigh's GIS manager, and her four-member team began producing maps from the city's 911 Command Center as the storm was raging, showing the location of property damage and water covered streets.
      "The night of the storm there were a lot of questions about power so we plugged our workstations right into the generators," said Sharpe. "We felt it was in our best interest to generate maps during the storm because they would be useful and beneficial on how and where to send people out right after it."
      Within hours after the storm hit, maps produced with the GIS were being used by emergency response personnel to assess the damage and prepare documentation for representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other disaster relief agencies. Using the GIS-assisted field survey, officials captured information on some 2,000 damaged properties. Each parcel was categorized in the GIS database according to whether it sustained major or minor damage and whether it was a commercial, single-family or multiple-family structure.
      In the days following the storm, the GIS was used to help coordinate efforts between FEMA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and local contractors to deploy thousands of pieces of debris removal equipment to help with the clean-up. By late winter, mulch piles - some 50 to 60 feet high and covering several acres - had been built around the city as crews completed their clean-up work. Officials within the city's public utilities department also used the GIS to locate water lines disrupted as falling trees pulled up roots, along with buried pipes. No less important, GIS was used to locate fire hydrants, some of which were hidden under piles of debris and needed to be safeguarded as front-end loaders and other heavy equipment moved in.
      Last year's response to Hurricane Fran using GIS was in marked contrast to 1988 when a tornado ripped through a 20-mile section of Raleigh. Nine years ago, damage assessment maps were done by hand; three maps were completed in two weeks. Last year using GIS, Sharpe and her team generated maps, produced damage assessment reports and provided other assistance in the first 36 hours after the storm hit.
      "Fran was tough, but GIS was really able to prove itself," said Sharpe.
      GIS also proved itself in Alaska last June, where officials working to contain the Crooked Creek fire climbed into helicopters to fly the fire's perimeter and record the fire's coordinates using hand-held GPS receivers. Back on the ground, the information was loaded into Kenai Borough's GIS where it was used to create a map of the burning forestland. This map was provided to borough emergency management planning teams, the state Division of Forestry and the fire command center in Ninikchik.
      As the fire burned over the next several days, Clough and his colleague Mary Toll at the borough's GIS facility produced maps showing fire trip lines (which, if crossed by the blaze, would "trip" mandatory evacuation plans); vegetation maps showing what kinds of trees were in the affected areas; and the location of fish-bearing streams. This last application allowed fire management teams to identify watersheds likely to be affected by the fire over the long-term. This information is of critical importance in this part of Alaska, which is home to some of the nation's richest commercial and sport salmon fisheries.
      No less important to the Alaska economy was the safety of the Fritz Creek-Soldotna intertie, a major electric transmission line. At one point the fire was only a few hundred yards from the power line. Fire management officials needed accurate maps of the line's location so they could defend it, or use the 100-foot-wide right-of-way as a possible firebreak.
      "Without GIS, the fire managers wouldn't have been able to act as proactively as they did to assign fire crews, develop evacuation plans and identify fire breaks," Clough remarked.
      The borough has used GDS software since 1987 to map some 26,500 square miles. It has used the software to track beetle infestation in the forests, to monitor the fallout of ash and dust from a volcanic eruption several years ago, to chart the spread of oil from the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989 in the adjacent waters of Cook Inlet and to identify the spawning grounds of native salmon.
      Clough has also produced maps for the Kenai Peninsula Borough's Emergency Response Plan. The maps included in the plan identify flood hazards, geophysical hazards, tsunami vulnerability, avalanche paths and Cook Inlet oil and gas facilities. GIS mapping was also used in the federally declared flooding on the Kenai Peninsula in September 1995. Maps identified primary residences, recreational cabins and businesses located in the flooded areas.
      Crooked Creek was the second fire in which the Borough used its GIS. Five years ago, the Pothole Lake fire threatened the community of Cooper Landing.
      "We threw GIS at that fire, too, and stopped it," Clough said.

About the Author:
David Wagman is director of corporate and industry relations for Convergent Group in Englewood, Colo. He holds a masters in City and Regional Planning. He may be reached at 303-486-1168.

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