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Emergency planning: when every minute counts, GIS matters

Local government: Emergency response

Emergency planning: when every minute counts, GIS matters
 This huge improvement will enable those involved in the response effort to confidently make better and speedier decisions, such as where to focus evacuation efforts for vulnerable people, how many evacuees may require shelter and what services may have to be redirected. Rapid access to accurate and detailed data enhances the decision-making process, which results in operational efficiency gains and can even lead to the saving of lives.
Andrew Hartley, Senior GIS Analyst, Civil Protection Unit, Bristol City Council

At a glance

Bristol City CouncilBristol City Council is setting an example through its creation of a fully-automated set of geographical information system (GIS) tools to enhance situational awareness for emergency responders.

Printable version: download PDFVisit the Bristol City Council website

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In the midst of a crisis, decision-making needs to be both speedy and appropriate, but making the right call requires rapid and robust access to accurate information.

Bristol City Council’s Civil Protection Unit has developed an extension to ESRI® ArcGIS® that brings together all the geographic information vital for emergency response planning in the event of an incident.

By creating its own bespoke tools within the extension, the team has removed literally hundreds of manual interactions, geo-processing techniques and algorithms, helping to condense the process into clear, logical and easy-to-follow steps.

Several Ordnance Survey datasets, ranging from 1:50 000 Scale Colour Raster to OS MasterMap® Topography Layer, as well as the council’s own information, are used as part of the solution that interrogates the area surrounding an incident. The tools allow users to quickly and easily locate the incident, extract and analyse nearby data and create several mapping and report outputs from templates.

Here, different scales of data are overlaid with information such as population and evacuation estimates, reports of vulnerable people, council assets and land ownership. Hazards and threats are also taken into account, as are the local weather conditions.

To support the operation of the tools, the Civil Protection Unit has written supporting documentation that clearly explains how to operate the tools, how long each step in the suggested process will take and what information could be provided as a result. This means that any emergency planner would be able to make well-informed decisions based on the latest information available.

Template showing meteorological data overlaid on OS Street View

  • Time taken to produce analysis, maps and relevant reports reduced from five hours to approximately 10 minutes.
  • Easy to envisage possible scenarios such as the effects of a cordon around a specific area.
  • Information used during an incident is stored securely and available in the event of a subsequent public enquiry.
  • Bristol City Council is sharing its expertise with other emergency planning teams.

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