Sharing data in a crisis-State and local groups work on interoperability

When a fire broke out in March 2007 in the Sierra Peak area near Anaheim, Calif., Assistant City Manager Tom Wood was on a business trip in Washington, D.C. Yet, using an Internet connection, he was able to log into the city's Enterprise

The EVOC is the result of a multiyear process that the city of Anaheim (anaheim.net) and its IT partner EDS (eds.com) have undertaken to integrate data and communications to improve emergency response.

'The vision has been solid from the beginning-to provide better situational awareness to decision makers in an easy-to-use application that brings together information from applications that were previously stovepiped," explains David Brown, an EDS employee and the EVOC project manager for Anaheim.

For almost 10 years, large metropolitan areas have been working on interoperability issues, but in many cases those efforts have been limited to getting telecommunications systems to communicate with one another. Sharing data during an emergency has proven a more difficult knowledge management challenge.

Especially since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, there's been a sense that better information sharing protocols are needed. For instance, during Katrina, officials in emergency operations centers (EOCs) needed to know where all the rail cars in the area were and what type of hazardous material was in each one, so they could send out HazMat teams to check on them. Many were under water.

During an emergency, officials also must know the status of hospital facilities near a disaster area, says Drew Sachs, VP, crisis and consequence management, for consultancy James Lee Witt & Associates (wittassoci ates.com), a part of GlobalOptions Group. "That data is often not readily available to an EOC," he adds.

Despite agencies' efforts to improve sharing real-time data, portals or intranets linking multiple emergency response agencies and jurisdictions are still rare. "You won't find many midsize cities that haven't touched on this, but few have a complete solution in place," says Sachs.

He notes that many regions have tried to create data warehouses to pool information, but they often run into infighting between agencies about how and when data can be accessed. Sometimes the data in them is not updated often, or they contain data in formats that are difficult to consolidate or manipulate.

Another complexity is getting data from private-sector players such as hospitals and chemical plants, which are often reluctant to share data with the government. There are also issues of sensitivity of information. Critical infrastructure, such as gas and oil pipelines, has national security implications.

"You have to have agency agreements in place about who is going to access information and how it is going to be used. Usually this has not been worked out," Sachs says. "Often it is done on the fly during an emergency, and it takes precious time during which EOCs don't get data."

He adds, "Some large cities like New York and Atlanta have solved these issues, but most second-tier cities are still working through them."

Anaheim began fostering interagency collaboration in November 2004 by bringing together police and fire computer-aided dispatch systems, traffic and surveillance camera feeds and an emergency notification system, with a Web browser front end, says Brown. The EVOC now pulls data from 15 sources. It can plot the location of all city vehicles and superimpose parcel data, so that officials can see plot parcel boundaries, who owns what buildings and if there is the potential of any hazardous materials.

"EVOC also integrates the city's calendar system, so that if something bad happens, we can easily look and see what type of events might be impacted," Brown says.

As with any data integration project, some agencies that own data are concerned about how it is going to be used and protected. "We did have issues about federal regulations regarding who can see certain information, and we had to be careful to take the right steps to limit that," he says. "We have a governance structure set up to determine these things."

A channel for communication

A disjointed response to the October 2003 Cedar Fire made San Diego (sandiego.gov) police and fire officials realize they needed to use knowledge management tools more efficiently.

Agencies weren't talking to each other as well as they should, recalls Officer Sandi Lehan of the San Diego Police Department's (sandiego.gov/police) Information Services division. "Each entity had its own EOC with liaisons to other operation centers, but communication broke down," she says. "We wanted to see better collaboration as a region."

That desire to share resources was the impetus behind Regional Command and Control Communications (3Cs), a grant-funded project of both the city of San Diego (sandiego.gov) and county of San Diego (sdcounty.ca.gov), which Lehan describes as "a public safety intranet for the region." The project uses microwave technology to feed live video and other public safety applications across the network.

The first phase of the project, which went live in March 2007, provides streaming video feeds from incident sites and videoconferencing between command centers. Participants include the San Diego Police Department, San Diego Sheriff's Department (sdsher iff.net ), San Diego Fire-Rescue Department (sandiego.gov/fireandems) and the county and city EOCs. It was first used during small fires and landslides in 2007, and had its first major test during the devastating fires of October 2007.

3Cs' main goal was to open up a channel for interagency communication to help incident commanders agree on priorities and allow people across agencies to ask questions of each other. "If they all see the same pictures," Lehan says, "they can avoid playing the telephone game where the message changes each time it is passed along."

During the October 2007 fires, the videoconference link stayed open for four straight days. It allowed law enforcement officials to ask fire personnel about priorities for evacuation and repopulation. Video links from helicopters allowed police to monitor the situation at Qualcomm Stadrum, where many evacuees were sheltered. Incident commanders described 3Cs as an enormous help in integrating agency response efforts.

Phase two of the project, which is just getting underway, will involve linking departments' data and applications. It will also expand 3Cs to networks of neighboring counties with which San Diego County has mutual aid agreements.

Governance of a multijurisdictional conglomerate is one of 3Cs' biggest challenges, along with ongoing funding.

"The technology has come a long way, but getting the people and organizations to build trust between each other is the tough part," Lehan says. "They are coining to the table now, and that is a big step forward."

Linking public health districts

As tornadoes ripped through the Commonwealth of Kentucky (ken tucky.gov) in February 2008, ongoing efforts to link the state's 56 local public health districts started to pay off.

Kentucky recently started using Emergency Services Integrators' (esi911.com) WebEOC software, a critical incident management tool that local public health and emergency management teams can log into over the Web to relay their needs to the state's EOC when they are overwhelmed.

During the tornadoes, the software helped with situational awareness about schools that were damaged, and coordinated resource requests regarding open shelters.

"We are using WebEOC as a common operating platform for local officials to feed real-time health and medical data," says Drew Chandler, IT and communications coordinator for the Kentucky Department for Public Health (chfs.ky.gov/dph).

The state is also starting to work on integration between WebEOC and its own Web-based GIS tool called the Kentucky Event Mapping and Analysis Portal, which can show 250 categories of infrastructure, including abandoned railroad beds that might be used as roads during an emergency. Chandler says WebEOC will also soon be integrated with EM System (emsys tem.com), software designed to improve real-time health system inventory resource allocation, as well as patient and evacuee tracking.

"People used to refer to the state EOC as a black hole because it was hard to get information once you were there, but not anymore," Chandler says. "Because everyone's on the same platform, it has opened up communication between agencies."

Mapping power

When the city of Anaheim first pulled data sources together into its EVOC portal, officials recognized something was missing. "We decided there was a little too much textual information and that it was a little dry," David Brown says, "but we found that projecting the information visually using mapping tools was very helpful."

Other state and local EOCs have realized the same thing and placed an emphasis on mapping tools. Officials in Virginia (virginia.gov) are deploying the Emergency Management Mapping Application (EMMA), a Web-based tool developed at Towson University (towson.edu) in Maryland. Built on ArcIMS software from ESRI (esri.com), EMMA integrates with WebEOC, the crisis management software used by the Virginia Department of Emergency Management (vdem.state.va.us).

Already deployed in Virginia by the city of Richmond (ci.richmond.va.us), Albemarle County (albemarle.org) and the city of Charlottesville (char lottesville.org) EOCs, EMMA is being tested at the state EOC this spring, says Sam Hall, geospatial projects manager for the Virginia Geographic Information Network, a division of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency (vita.virginia.gov).

The power of EMMA is to add a geospatial element to two types of data, Hall explains. The first is a foundation level-things that don't change quickly such as roads, utilities and county boundaries, for instance. The second type is operational data about current incidents such as power outages or areas impacted by flooding. An EOC may have a list of shelters open and accepting people, Hall explains. "EMMA allows emergency managers to see those on a map," he says, "and how they relate to other factors such as road closures or first-responder resources."

Hall says there are still many questions about integrating GIS data sets from players around the commonwealth of Virginia. How do they share data between three instances of EMMA? How can the date of other local GIS teams be added to the statewide effort, and how will those groups access EMMA?

Hall believes the move toward a GIS service-oriented architecture (SOA) is part of the answer. SOA can break down barriers to sharing GIS data, he says.

"A county such as Fairfax County in Virginia may have robust GIS data, but we have to find ways to publish it via Web services so it can be consumed by the feds or the state or other jurisdictions around the state," Hall explains. "We don't want to have to ask them for a CD of all their data or to have to replicate it in our system. We might have 130 localities using GIS, and the operational data is key. We want real-time data sharing."

For instance, in a power outage, emergency officials want real-time data about where citizens are without power. Traditionally, that involves calling multiple power companies, getting reports and then mapping that information, then starting all over again on the calls to keep the information up to date.

"We are working with the power companies on Web services that will make that data available to authorized emergency management officials who need it," Hall says.

Despite the multitude of challenges they face, state and local governments have made some important progress on sharing data in emergency situations, because they realize how important an issue it is, notes Drew Sachs of James Lee Witt & Associates, "but it takes money and resources, new computer systems and sometimes the creation of new organizations to make it happen."