If you’ve ever taken a class at the California Specialized Training Institute, you’re very familiar with the fictitious city of Santa Luisa Del Mar... Sludmar!
Recently I had the opportunity to take their Emergency Management Concepts course, which covers G191 (Emergency Operations Center/Incident Command System Interface), G775 (EOC Management and Operations), and a G611 area over a week long course culminating in a big exercise.
I, of course, was assigned as the GIS specialist!
They handed me some pdfs of maps, all different shapes, all different grids, some with different names for the areas! Nothing that could be easily used or combined or anything.
So, knowing how these exercises go and what would be needed of me, I set out to digitize all of the major aspects of the maps. This involved georeferencing the different pdfs to the main basemap which has no real-world geolocation. But if I could get them all lined up, I could make points, lines, and polygons of the data!
I would also output them as geotiffs, which I could open in GIMP and extract certain things, make other parts transparent, and readd it to QGIS as a raster layer.
In the end, I ended up with thousands of points, lines and polygons, and even digitized all of the police beats just by reading the descriptions and drawing the polygons.
I then set up a system using pre-made symbols so that any time an incident/call came in, I just had to plop the point down, add the calltype, and it’d do the rest automatically.
It took hours, and days to do this, but it was worth it and it was really effective! You can see the results above of the different maps. There were utility grids, liquifaction zones, tsunamis, and dam bursts/flooding! There were hundreds of calls, and shelters set up, and incident command posts for this’s and that’s. And it all came in at a rush, and I was still able to produce a map every 10 mins with the latest info, post it up on a slideshow for everyone to see, and keep at it.
GIS for the win baby!
