The emphasis of the talk is a factual chronology covering the initial 30 days of GIS support for WTC. The presentation will include input from Columbia University, FEMA, FEMA Urban Search & Rescue, FDNY, Hunter College, NASA, NIMA, NYC, NY State, USACE, and others involved in the response operations. We will present the actual chain of events in our work there, personal accounts, and display sample products.
Following the attacks of September 11th, the nation has discussed Homeland Security and its relationship to everything else. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the lead federal agency for natural disasters and the lead for consequences on man-made disasters. While we cannot identify exactly how GIS would be used to support a specific future event, we can pass on the things that were done in New York City and lessons learned there. GIS technology has become a mainstay in emergency response on the Federal level. I will identify the contacts and partnerships between FEMA and State and Local governments. We hope that our chronology will help to clarify the role of GIS in support of large-scale disasters.
The GIS element of an Emergency Management office can be anything from a single individual with numerous duties to a multi-office, agency-wide corporate-type environment. Funding is often a major setback, as many people within the emergency management environment cannot justify the investment based on their lack of understanding on the significant role that GIS can have in a crisis. GIS products and data have been invaluable in the response and recovery efforts of disasters in recent years.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has GIS resources at our headquarters in Washington D.C., at each of the 10 Regional Offices across the country, and at the majority of our Disaster Field Offices which support statewide, federally declared disasters. We have regular full time employees and a cadre of reservist staff that support our resurgent staffing requirements.
As a result of the attacks on, and collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City, the cities Emergency Operation Center was evacuated and later destroyed. Within hours, the city was running a new/temporary GIS for their emergency management needs. In addition, there were several other GIS operations around the City supporting the rescuers, local, state, and federal governments. I arrived from Washington State on the morning of Sep 16 to manage FEMA’s GIS operations in New York City. Our role is to assist the State and City in their response and recovery efforts. My first objective was to meet with the local GIS entities in NYC to facilitate data sharing and minimize the duplication of efforts. FEMA operated 2 GIS nodes in New York City with daily staffing up to 25 people covering 24-hour operations. Our initial support was focused on Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) and over the next three weeks the efforts transitioned into recovery mode. GIS products supported decision-making at the highest levels, allowing the Incident commander to see the site in a completely different perspective. Our products tracked mobile offices, medical support teams, heat from the fires, hazards, and debris. Technologies implemented included LIDAR, FLIR, GPS, Digital Imagery, and Air sampling. The majority of GIS requests were for printed products.
Many of the problems we ran into in NYC are fairly common in a disaster-type environment. Office space, power availability, web connectivity, data access, and adequate staffing are issues that are soon resolved.
Problems were identified early on with building addressing. There are many occurrences in the city of buildings with multiple street addresses, and there was no system to group them by structure. Efforts were quickly made to resolve this. The City began to create a coverage, which would link the Building Identification Numbers (BINs) to street addresses. This would allow data from many different sources to be used as required.
There was very little mapping of the subsurface infrastructure making it difficult to identify everything that has been buried under the city over the years. A team was pulled together to deal with the collection and creation of this dataset which will be pertinent to the rebuilding of the area.
Working to meet the needs of those requesting products, hardware requirements quickly exceeded what was available. The city was able to accept donations of hardware and software from venders around the country and they quickly put everything to good use. Within FEMA, we deploy our GIS hardware to the field. This was quickly augmented with additional laptops, plotters, and printers.
Working in this type of chaos, there are always new issues which arise. In this case, we were dealing with an event that we previously would have believed was impossible. Our focus on these new problems is on the required outcome and we work backwards from there. In some cases we simply pursue the most direct solution rather than investing unavailable time developing a more streamlined option. Here are several unique problems and their solutions:
1.With 12 Urban Search and Rescue Teams rotating through, as well as FDNY searching, we needed a system to track the searched areas and document the findings. The first floor plan data we received was on paper. From this we digitized the slurry wall and some of the infrastructure to meet our basic needs. Shortly thereafter we received 4 different sets of CAD files in a single day, from separate sources. We worked with a structural engineer and other USAR staff to determine which dataset best met our needs. Once the decision was made, we removed the extraneous information and began to produce our Searched Status products. When the USAR teams returned from the field, part of their debriefing of the work period was to identify where they had been and what they had observed. This information was input into in our GIS every 12 hours and updated products produced.
2.Distributing urgent products in support of USAR to their destinations was a priority, as it is easy for things to disappear into the hands of others. To guarantee that products reached the field, our Field Observers posted them at their required locations. This meant daily trips to ground zero with paper maps and a stapler, hanging them at each of the pre-defined locations and removing the outdated products. With the constant data updates, product currency was important. In addition, we acquired a Military Police Officer who was assigned to limit access to our area and ensure that we were in control of the dissemination of our products.
3.This incident was the first opportunity many of us had to work with LIDAR data. With data delivered almost daily, we utilized this information within FEMA in two primary projects; to identify subsidence of the debris pile and to estimate the volume of debris in the area. The subsidence analysis included data from Sep 17 through October 3. We wanted to make certain that the people working on the debris pile were safe. We confirmed that the rescuers and de-construction teams were not threatened, and that the areas of major change were places that had been cleared of debris to gain access to other areas. Our volumetric calculations took into consideration a pre-event bare-earth LIDAR data set, the total volume of the sub-surface structure, and the destroyed-but-standing structures within the debris field. The first step was to digitize the debris extent from the imagery. We then QC’d the polygons with an application written in the field using the LIDAR data to verify that our edges fell in the area of transition between the street and pile. We also had to correctly distinguish between standing structures and compacted debris. On several occasions we ground-truthed the data as well. Once the polygons were complete, we calculated the volume with an AML written by our staff, using different variables for the two debris types. We worked with our structural engineers to validate our data and concur with our model before the data was officially utilized.
4.Our staffing flexibility is designed into our systems with FEMA. We have a large pool of reservist staff which deploy from around the nation, and can tap into other federal resources as well. In addition, the USAR system brings in staff from other organizations across the country. Our GIS staff consisted of individuals from FEMA, NASA, NIMA, NPS, USACE, CA OES, CO BLM, MN DNR, UT BLM, and MapInfo Corp.
Preparedness and awareness are the places to start. From there, significant issues must be resolved. Creating a system to pull qualified people from elsewhere in your organization or from other sources can feed your resurgent staffing needs. Maintaining good relations and current contact lists of other GIS resources in your area can assist you with unique data needs. Keeping your minds open to completely new ideas on data collection, analysis, and display will allow for an increase in support over a static product list.
This paper and presentation are based on a chronology containing input from FDNY, NYC Offices, Hunter College, Esri, Columbia University, NY State Offices, and FEMA, all of which were involved with the GIS operations supporting the response and recovery in New York City.