California: A Natural Disaster
By Mary Jo Wagner

"And Now This" was the headline of an article that appeared in the Jan. 23, 1995 issue of TIME magazine. A most fitting three-word caption to sum up Californian's plight over the last four years - the "this" referring to the January flooding of both Northern and Southern California. To the horror of residents, that headline would have still been valid had it appeared in a late March '95 issue, given that torrential rains hit again just two months later, bringing the declared county disaster toll to 39 of the state's 58 counties.
      The Golden State has seen it all. But these last four years have been particularly brutal: wildfires in Oakland in 1991; L.A. riots provoking fires in 1992; more brush fires in Southern California in 1993; the Northridge earthquake in 1994; and now flooding and landslides in 1995. Each disaster has brought millions of dollars of damage, and seems to surpass the magnitude and extent of the previous one.
     The "California Comeback" as Gov. Pete Wilson termed the state's ability to regain its footing after each bout with Mother Nature, has been an all too familiar phenomenon for quite some time. But somehow, Californians never fail to find optimism amidst the rubble, ashes or mudcaked belongings that lie at their feet.
     In light of being the most favored state for natural disasters, disaster preparedness has become a forced way of life for not only the citizens, but most urgently for those people whom everyone looks to, and depends on, during emergencies such as the local, state and federal agencies responsible for emergency relief. In the state of California, that would be the California Office of Emergency Services (OES) as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
      With 528,000 square miles of land and 58 counties to think about, OES has a tremendous amount of responsibility. They are the basic contact for the single resident, to the media, to the National Guard when disaster strikes. The management of an information and coordination network of that magnitude cannot be effectively handled using push-pins on a map. So five years ago they started building their efficient management tool: a geographic information system (GIS).
      Five years and 300 databases later, Dave Kehrlein, OES GIS coordinator and architect of the GIS, says that this system is not perfect by any means but it has allowed them to do more than what would be possible using conventional means to handle emergencies.
      Kehrlein obtained statewide digitized map bases from both industry and local agencies to start constructing the GIS using ARC/Info, MapInfo and Atlas software.
      "Despite what the public may think, California is not well-mapped," said Kehrlein. "California has grown extremely rapidly over the past 15 years and there has been very little funding to do mapping. Probably 20 percent of the roads in the state are not mapped."
      But with each disaster or new mapping project implemented, more and more information has trickled, sometimes, flooded in, giving Kehrlein the material desired to update and improve the GIS. He credits the catastrophic Northridge earthquake of Jan. 17, 1994 for making the GIS as comprehensive as it is. After that event, they went out and collected every bit of available information relative to the earthquake and mapped it all for the first time. Now there are maps for practically every occasion: flood maps generated by FEMA and OES; fault line maps from the USGS and the Southern California Earthquake Center; shaking intensity models by OES; ground acceleration maximum probability maps; and fire risk maps just to name a few. Updates and new additions are being made constantly to try and fill in the gaps that are still missing.
      In addition to the GIS center at OES's headquarters in the state's capitol, Sacramento, Kehrlein has also personally assisted in establishing other GIS centers statewide in order to help expediate relief efforts and give support to the headquarters.
      So when disaster struck last January 10, and then again exactly two short months later, OES was ready.
      While the floods were attacking both Northern and Southern California, the OES was busy calling in their emergency "hires," or recruits to help handle the situation. Mariana Sharp, a consultant, was one of them.
      As a public information officer, her main responsibilities are to inform and coordinate. She is the media's lifeline and hence, a communication support to people who've had to evacuate their homes or apartments, by letting them know where Red Cross or other shelters are.
      Sharp employs another set of technology to help her do that. Called the Emergency Digital Information System (EDIS), Sharp uses this network to send press releases, news items and information and weather updates to the newsrooms statewide. EDIS is also used to inform the National Guard and other emergency relief units of current and changing situations and for rescue mission requests.
      While Sharp was busy keeping everyone informed and lending support to coordinating rescue missions, Kehrlein was glued to the GIS. As the floods were turning numerous towns into ponds and leaving thousands of people homeless, Kehrlein and colleagues tried to discover the extent and magnitude of the disaster to understand what they were up against.
      One of the first tasks OES does is set up application centers for people to register for FEMA aid and send out field teams to inspect the damage. FEMA has developed a telephone registration system whereby people can register for assistance over the phone. Using the first registration calls that come over the system, OES can geocode those on their digital base maps in the GIS to map out where the locations of the applicants are. Kehrlein is then in a position to inform the field teams of where they need to go. For these floods, they had a lot of area to cover: about 100,000 sq. miles.
      Locations of application centers or field personnel can also be pinpointed through addresses they receive or other pieces of information, which can be fed into the database. GIS connects the address to its geographic location. That area then appears on the screen allowing them to locate residences, roads, buildings and other types of important information.
      "It's a very complex environment because you've got all the various local, state and federal agencies coming together on these massive operations," he continued. "And the main core of the emergency management services is not automated." The main core being agencies such as the National Guard, the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. That means that OES has a lot of people depending on them.
      The National Guard for example takes all of their orders from OES during emergencies. Having no kind of database management system at their facilities, they respond solely to requests. According to Deirdre Allingham, a public affairs officer at the National Guard, the ability of OES to respond quickly to emergency situations has helped build a strong relationship between them.
      "We have a liaison officer at OES headquarters so that whatever they need from the Guard, they can go right to that officer and the officer can call us, and boom, we're out there helping."
      And helping they all were: OES, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, FEMA, the National Guard and individual volunteers. But the damage was inevitable. Eleven people were killed. Both the Napa and Russian River valleys were hit, but fortunately for the wine business, the former was not wiped out, which cannot be said for the latter area. The regions around Sacramento and Malibu in Southern California were also drenched. The losses were the highest ever for floods in the state, exceeding $1.3 billion, including $92.5 million destruction to agriculture.
      If that wasn't enough, no sooner had houses been cleaned up and repairs gotten underway then a second set of killer rains pounced on Northern California - in particular on the Salinas Valley, often referred to as the nation's salad bowl because that's where half the U.S. vegetable production is grown. For Santa Barbara residents, they witnessed their third major flood of 1995. The Monterey Peninsula was cut off for nearly 24 hours. A bridge washed out on I-5, near Coalinga, California's main north-south artery. Entire crops were wiped out including artichokes and strawberries and there was serious tree loss in Sacramento. Losses in crop damage surpassed the January floods.
      OES naturally responded to this second round of floods just as they did in January. In fact, it was basically just a continuation of their work already in progress. The emergency hires had not been sent home yet. Public information officers were still in the field, speaking with victims and attending community meetings. All of the emergency relief units were still on-guard. Now they all are working closely together to get things back to normal. This then leads to another question.
      "Why," as Allingham commented, "is California never prepared for an emergency?"
      "I don't think we're always caught off-guard," answered Kehrlein. "But we could be a lot better prepared. No question about it."
      Many problems come into play and each natural disaster has its own special characteristics and considerations. Even though these past floods have been linked to the ever-monitored El Nino, a semi-periodic warming of equatorial Pacific waters that triggers major weather changes around the world, nobody, not even forecasters, saw it coming. Not even OES's capability to track storms through weather satellite imagery on Internet was sufficient. They hit so fast, there was no time for any kind of preparation.
      In addition, California is laced with places programmed for flooding. In the northern part of the state there are miles and miles of rice fields and large bypass areas begging to be flooded.
      Earthquakes are still impossible to predict so those will continue to cause the most shock, damage and chaos. Brush fires are a little bit easier to prepare for but vegetation, an important factor to consider for creating fire risk maps, is not easy to map and call for extensive field surveys. Nonetheless, progress is being made and some mitigation projects are in place.
      "Great strides are being made in earthquake preparedness in terms of what to do when one hits," said Kehrlein. "Nobody has been able to predict an earthquake so the reality is one minute you don't have one and the next minute you do. "
      If we had a Kobe level earthquake (referring to the January '95 quake in Japan), in terms of damage and destruction incident right now, we don't have all the information systems in place to respond effectively," he continued. "Northridge was just below the threshold of our breakdown point." That could be why getting better prepared and establishing more information systems is a pet project right now for Kehrlein and his colleagues.
       Prevention in any way, shape or form is one of the key factors to minimizing the extent and magnitude of natural disasters. And it is in the area of prevention where a GIS can be a major asset - whether it be for OES, the governor's office or local authorities.
      "Some uses of the GIS are wonderful and very helpful in showing at a glance where disaster areas are," commented Sharp. "We can use it to find out which regions we need to respond to so in this sense it is a monitoring tool. It is very useful for devising prevention measures for the future and identifying risk areas."
      Being able to locate areas of towns or cities that have repeatedly been hit from flooding, fires or earthquakes through GIS-created maps can help decision-makers better update zoning ordinances. Insurance companies can be aided in trying to sort out claims. The GIS can be useful for deciding the best prevention measures to take, whether it be more levees or a catch basin. Both Sharp and Kehrlein say that the maps they have supplied have indeed been used to identify risk areas and devise efficient ways to combat the repeat damage "syndrome."
      "The maps are getting put to better and better use all the time," said Kehrlein. "One reason is because we have far more complete data now so that we know what happened and we can map what happened for real and not just a summation of what happened. Another reason is, we can get site specific very easily so the level of sophistication is much higher. We think prevention wise, GIS is going to pay for itself a hundred times over very easily because it can get people focused."
      Focused indeed. After the Northridge earthquake for example, OES could produce a map showing how many refrigerators were lost, television sets lost or how many cinder block fences fell. They can get as detailed as having maps of just bridges that were damaged or came down. This kind of specificity is extremely useful to mitigation authorities.
      Although remote sensing data, especially radar data during storms, has been noted as a viable support tool for monitoring disasters and damage assessments, OES does not utilize it. They have studied it as an option but so far have concluded that it is not useful for them.
      FEMA on the other hand utilizes NOAA/AVHRR data from the optical TIROS satellite in their normal work operations. With its 1-km resolution, AVHRR data can be used to show the general maximum extent of a disaster such as flooding. This data, coupled with airborne data can indicate the actual extent of the event. Maps can then be made with FEMA's GIS network. However the TIROS satellite is hampered by cloud-cover and therefore not always a useful source of information.
      "We have not been able to use it for the California floods because they occurred when there was cloud-cover," said Paul Bryant, a GIS coordinator for FEMA. "We have used it for prior floods."
      One of those prior floods was the drenching of Albany, Ga. last summer. Bryant explains. "During the floods, we downloaded one of the TIROS passes and analyzed it for flood/non-flood areas. We have a database of all the sewage treatment plants and all the public water supplies. So after doing the classification, using ARC/Info, we overlayed the TIROS image with the sewage treatment plants and public water supplies. From that it appeared that sewage was running into the public water supply." Their hunch was right.
      They called the appropriate authorities and indeed the sewage was contaminating the water supply.
      "FEMA initiated sending 700,000 gallons of water per day to the people so that no one got sick drinking sewage contaminated water," he concluded. That same problem also occurred in California but the clouds got in the way. FEMA was not able to apply the same technology.
       However, FEMA did use radar airborne imagery to gather data from some of the flooded California regions in January. That imagery was presented to OES. FEMA also produced flood maps from that data and the GIS and supplied it to the state.
      OES also employs Global Positioning Systems technology as well which they have used for past events, particularly the firestorms of last year. "We use it a lot on fires. Somebody flies the fire with GPS and then they download the files so we can integrate them in the GIS," said Kehrlein. "We GPS'd the fires, in terms of the actual specific damage points. We even GPS'd the riots. We've been using GPS since 1991."
      Given all of the technology and methods OES has at their fingertips, it's no surprise that they have big plans for their GIS and related mitigation programs. Hopefully through their hard efforts, the California Comeback will be a thing of the past.

About the Author:
Mary Jo Wagner is a freelance writer/editor who specializes in writing about GIS and remote sensing. She can be reached at 715-235-7422 or through e-mail: [email protected]

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