Meeting the challenge of "situational awareness"

Confronted late in 2007 with the worst wild fires in generations, public officials in Southern California were desperate for any information that would tell them what was happening and where. In the parlance of crisis management, they needed greater "situational awareness."

Lucky for them, one of the good corporate citizens that had rushed to help during the crisis, Microsoft, knew a thing or two about situational awareness and how to increase it. Microsoft not only responded to the call itself, but enlisted one of its Gold Certified Partners, Infusion Development, which had developed a state of the art emergency management platform that proved of great value both in fighting and recovering from the fires.

Built on a stack of Microsoft products (Office SharePoint Server 2007, Virtual Earth, InfoPath 2007, SQL Server 2005, Live Communications Server), Infusion's Joint Emergency Planning and Response System (JEPRS) provides real-time communication and over-the-map collaboration for all critical stakeholders in an emergency, including managers and first responders. Its use during Southern California's wild fire crisis was two-fold.

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Providing critical information to the people who need it

First, during the final weekend of the fire, Microsoft and Infusion were able to aid crisis managers in four Southern California counties by giving them a better sense of what was happening on the ground. This was accomplished, says Andrew Zdunich, Infusion's director of public safety and security, by taking thermal imagery captured by NASA and overlaying it on a Virtual Earth map using the platform's MapCruncher feature.

That told responders where the remaining hotspots were. To tell them what structures still were threatened, aerial shots detailing the location of houses and other data were layered on top of the Virtual Earth map using the platform's powerful application programming interface (API).

The mapping effort was done "as a general offering," says Zdunich, the Infusion representative present during the crisis. "It was available to anyone who wanted to use it."

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Helping cut through bureaucratic red tape

With the fires contained, officials turned their attention to recovery. Microsoft and Infusion were able to be of considerable help in this phase as well.

Responding to a request from San Diego County, Zdunich configured JEPRS for use as a damage-assessment tool. The result was the County of San Diego Damage Assessment Collaboration Portal, which is designed to share damage-assessment information both internally and with the public.

Using Virtual Earth's mapping and imagery capabilities, the portal uses icons to signify homes the county has reported as damaged in the fire. A Federal Emergency Management Administration form can be called up by clicking on the icon, and officials and homeowners alike can see what information remains to be filled in.

Additionally, the county is able to interact with FEMA via the portal to verify damage to individual residences. And the owners of those residences are able to use the public-facing portal to identify where they are in the assessment-compensation cycle.

The goal, Zdunich says, was "to decrease the cycle and get money to the people affected."