Abstract

Special Population Planner 4: An Open Source Release
Track: Disaster Management and Emergency Response
Author(s): James Kuiper, Willian Metz, Edward Tanzman

Emergencies like Hurricane Katrina and the recent California wildfires underscore the critical need to meet the complex challenge of planning for individuals with special needs and for institutionalized special populations. People with special needs and special populations often have difficulty responding to emergencies or taking protective actions. Special Population Planner (SPP) is an ArcGIS-based emergency planning system released as an open source product. SPP provides for easy production of maps, reports, and analyses to develop and revise emergency response plans. It includes tools to manage a voluntary registry of data for people with special needs and locations of special populations, integrated links to plans and documents, tools for response planning and analysis, facility and resource characteristics and contact data, and preformatted reports and maps. The system can be readily adapted for new settings without programming and is broadly applicable. Full documentation and a demonstration database are included in the release.

James Kuiper
Argonne National Laboratory
9700 S. Cass Avenue
Building 900/H03
Lemont , Illinois 60439-4832
United States
Phone: 630-252-6206
Fax: 630-252-3611
E-mail: jkuiper@anl.gov

Willian Metz
Argonne National Laboratory
9700 S. Cass Avenue
Lemont , Illinois 60439-4832
United States
Phone: 630-252-3271
E-mail: wmetz@anl.gov

Edward Tanzman
Argonne National Laboratory
9700 S. Cass Ave.
Lemont , Illinois 60439-4832
United States
Phone: 630-252-3263
E-mail: tanzman@anl.gov