SUCCESSFUL RESPONSE STARTS WITH A MAP
Improving Geospatial Support for Disaster Management
THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS
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NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for the report were chosen for their special competences and with regard for appropriate balance.
This study was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Award No. W-92759; U.S. Department of Commerce/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Contract No. 50-DGNA-1-90024; U.S. Department of Defense/National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Award No. NMA501-03-1-2019 T0029; and Department of the Interior/U.S. Geological Survey, Grant No. 03HQGR0147. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organizations or agencies that provided support for the project.
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Cover: Designed by Michele de la Menardiere. Top left shows a U.S. Coast Guard rescue from a home surrounded by floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (AP photo by David J. Phillip); middle right, a simulation of a category-3 storm surge in New Orleans showing emergency services (image courtesy the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency); bottom left shows an area in Long Beach, Mississippi, roughly 1 week after Hurricane Katrina (image, courtesy of Bruce Davis, Department of Homeland Security). Background shows satellite imagery of a forest fire (image courtesy Digital Globe).
Copyright 2007 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
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COMMITTEE ON PLANNING FOR CATASTROPHE: A BLUEPRINT FOR IMPROVING GEOSPATIAL DATA, TOOLS, AND INFRASTRUCTURE
MICHAEL F. GOODCHILD, Chair,
University of California, Santa Barbara
ANDREW J. BRUZEWICZ,
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Remote Sensing/GIS Center, Hanover, New Hampshire
SUSAN L. CUTTER,
University of South Carolina, Columbia
PAUL J. DENSHAM,
University College London
AMY K. DONAHUE,
University of Connecticut, West Hartford
J. PETER GOMEZ,
Xcel Energy, Denver, Colorado
PATRICIA HU,
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Knoxville, Tennessee
JUDITH KLAVANS,
University of Maryland, College Park
JOHN J. MOELLER,
Northrop Grumman TASC, Chantilly, Virginia
MARK MONMONIER,
Syracuse University, New York
BRUCE OSWALD,
James W. Sewell Co., Latham, New York
CARL REED,
Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc., Ft. Collins, Colorado
ELLIS M. STANLEY, SR.,
Emergency Preparedness Department City of Los Angeles, California
Staff
ANN G. FRAZIER, Program Officer
JARED P. ENO, Senior Program Assistant (since August 2006)
AMANDA M. ROBERTS, Senior Program Assistant (through August 2006)
MAPPING SCIENCE COMMITTEE
KEITH C. CLARKE, Chair,
University of California, Santa Barbara
ISABEL F. CRUZ,
University of Illinois, Chicago
ROBERT P. DENARO,
NAVTEQ Corporation, Chicago, Illinois
SHOREH ELHAMI,
Delaware County Auditor’s Office, Delaware, Ohio
DAVID R. FLETCHER,
GPC, Inc., Albuquerque, New Mexico
JIM GERINGER, ESRI,
Wheatland, Wyoming
JOHN R. JENSEN,
University of South Carolina, Columbia
NINA S.-N. LAM,
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
MARY L. LARSGAARD,
University of California, Santa Barbara
DAVID R. MAIDMENT,
The University of Texas, Austin
ROBERT B. MCMASTER,
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
SHASHI SHEKHAR,
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
NANCY TOSTA,
Ross & Associates Environmental Consulting, Ltd., Seattle, Washington
EUGENE TROBIA,
Arizona State Land Department, Phoenix
Staff
ANN G. FRAZIER, Program Officer
JARED P. ENO, Senior Program Assistant (since August 2006)
AMANDA M. ROBERTS, Senior Program Assistant (through August 2006)
BOARD ON EARTH SCIENCES AND RESOURCES
Members
GEORGE M. HORNBERGER, Chair,
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
M. LEE ALLISON,
Arizona Geological Survey, Tucson
GREGORY B. BAECHER,
University of Maryland, College Park
STEVEN R. BOHLEN,
Joint Oceanographic Institutions, Washington, D.C.
KEITH C. CLARKE,
University of California, Santa Barbara
DAVID COWEN,
University of South Carolina, Columbia
ROGER M. DOWNS,
Pennsylvania State University, University Park
JEFF DOZIER,
University of California, Santa Barbara
KATHERINE H. FREEMAN,
Pennsylvania State University, University Park
RHEA L. GRAHAM,
Pueblo of Sandia, Bernalillo, New Mexico
ROBYN HANNIGAN,
Arkansas State University, State University
MURRAY W. HITZMAN,
Colorado School of Mines, Golden
V. RAMA MURTHY,
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
RAYMOND A. PRICE,
Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada
BARBARA A. ROMANOWICZ,
University of California, Berkeley
JOAQUIN RUIZ,
University of Arizona, Tucson
MARK SCHAEFER,
Global Environment and Technology Foundation, Arlington, Virginia
RUSSELL STANDS-OVER-BULL,
BP American Production Company, Pryor, Montana
BILLIE L. TURNER II,
Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts
TERRY C. WALLACE, JR.,
Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico
STEPHEN G. WELLS,
Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nevada
THOMAS J. WILBANKS,
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee
Staff
ANTHONY R. DE SOUZA, Director
PAUL M. CUTLER, Senior Program Officer
ELIZABETH A. EIDE, Senior Program Officer
DAVID A. FEARY, Senior Program Officer
ANNE M. LINN, Senior Program Officer
ANN G. FRAZIER, Program Officer
Acknowledgments
This report has been reviewed in draft form by individuals chosen for their diverse perspectives and technical expertise, in accordance with procedures approved by the National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Report Review Committee. The purpose of this independent review is to provide candid and critical comments that will assist the institution in making its published report as sound as possible and to ensure that the report meets institutional standards for objectivity, evidence, and responsiveness to the study charge. The review comments and draft manuscript remain confidential to protect the integrity of the deliberative process. We wish to thank the following individuals for their review of this report:
Massoud Amin, University of Minnesota
Jane Bullock, Bullock and Haddow, LLC
Michael Domaratz, U.S. Geological Survey (retired)
Gerald Galloway, University of Maryland
David Kehrlein, Environmental Systems Research Institute
Arthur Lerner-Lam, Columbia University
Henk Scholten, Free University in Amsterdam
Seth Stein, Northwestern University
Gayle Sugiyama, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Although the reviewers listed above have provided many constructive comments and suggestions, they were not asked to endorse the conclusions or recommendations, nor did they see the final draft of the report before its release. The review of this report was overseen by Dr. Robert
Hamilton, National Research Council (retired) and U.S. Geological Survey (retired), and Dr. Chris G. Whipple, ENVIRON International Corporation. Appointed by the NRC, they were responsible for making certain that an independent examination of the report was carried out in accordance with institutional procedures and that all review comments were carefully considered. Responsibility for the final content of this report rests entirely with the authoring committee and the institution.
Preface
After the events of September 11, 2001, there was a widespread sense in the United States and in many other parts of the world that humanity was entering a new and more dangerous era. Subsequent events, such as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005, and the terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005, in London have if anything strengthened that feeling, as have the potential threats of pandemic flu, dirty bombs, and smallpox. Whether one believes that greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for an increase in the frequency and severity of hurricanes, or that television and the Internet make us all too aware of potential dangers, or that the sheer magnitude of historical events such as the European Black Death of the fourteenth century, the 1556 earthquake in Shansi, China, or the Asian flu pandemic of 1919 overshadow our modern disasters by orders of magnitude, the sheer complexity and interdependencies of modern society clearly make us enormously vulnerable, whether it be to natural disasters or to terrorist attacks. The modern systems that we require to sustain our way of life—the systems that transport our energy, create our food supply, allow us to communicate over vast distances, and maintain our low infant mortality and high life expectancy—are all vulnerable to degrees that would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. Furthermore, the dollar toll from these events is increasing due to population growth in disaster-prone areas, especially in those areas susceptible to hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes.
In this new world of the twenty-first century it is essential that we anticipate such events and their potential impacts. It is impossible to know exactly what form they will take, how severe they will be, or where and
when they will occur, but the value of planning has been amply demonstrated. This report is about the value of a specific area of planning and about how the United States might make improvements in that specific area. Geospatial data and tools are currently used for emergency response, but recent events have demonstrated the many ways in which our geospatial data and tools and the use we make of them fail us, both in preparing for unpredictable events and in responding to them afterwards. This report examines the current use of geospatial data and tools in emergency management and makes recommendations to improve that use.
The National Research Council’s (NRC’s) Committee on Geography, now the Geographical Sciences Committee, first discussed the need for this study in 2000, well before the events of September 11, 2001. Those and subsequent events led to a greater sense of urgency, a search for sponsorship, refinement of the study’s charge, and to the eventual formation of a study committee in 2004 under the auspices of the NRC Mapping Science Committee. We thank the sponsors, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Geological Survey, for providing funding for this study.
The committee was composed of 13 members and included scientists, social scientists, and engineers from academia, industry, government, and nongovernmental organizations. Committee members included people with experience in designing decision support tools; users of these tools; and experts in natural hazards, risk analysis, transportation, utility infrastructure, geospatial data and remote sensing, disaster planning and response, and computer and information science. The committee included members with extensive field experience in emergency management and response.
Several meetings were held to gather evidence from individuals and representatives of organizations and agencies, including emergency response practitioners and experts in geospatial data and tools. The primary information-gathering event was a workshop held on October 5-6, 2005, which included five discussion panels with approximately 25 panelists from the relevant academic disciplines and agencies and from the commercial software and data products industry. The workshop included a mix of discussion panels and breakout discussions.
This report presents the committee’s findings and recommendations. It is designed to be read by any public official who is concerned to make his or her community disaster resilient: leaders of emergency response and emergency operations agencies, elected officials and citizens who are concerned about community vulnerability, agency staff who make or recommend decisions about the allocation or acquisition of resources, developers of technologies, or members of committees charged with developing policies.