Managing Chaos Relies on Fast, Accurate Information
   New York City--Creating a Disaster Management GIS on the Fly

On September 11, 2001, New York City's Emergency Operations
Center (EOC) was in all respects a state-of-the-art facility,
ready for any crisis. Only three and one-half years old, the EOC
was equipped with generators, backup generators, a water supply,
and a ventilation system capable of filtering out 99 percent of
airborne impurities as well as computer hardware, telephones, and
radios with uninterruptible power supplies.  Operated by the
Mayor's Office of Emergency Management (OEM), the EOC was within
walking distance of City Hall and most City agencies, and in a
crisis it would operate as a self-contained headquarters from
which the huge and diverse New York City government could
operate. As many as 68 agencies could work there, with their
software installed on workstations and direct links to data they
would need. All of the e quipment was housed within steel-framed,
reinforced exterior walls designed to withstand 200-mile-an-hour
winds.

But the EOC was not indestructible. When two jetliners slammed
into 1 World Trade Center and 2 World Trade Center and the two
skyscrapers collapsed, numerous fires started throughout the
complex including one at the EOC's home, 7 World Trade Center.
By the end of the day, all of that state-of-the-art equipment
and data was no more.

Suddenly Starting from Scratch

Although no EOC personnel were in the center at the time, the
loss to the City was nonetheless immense. At a time of
unimaginable catastrophe, when the City needed the EOC's
capabilities the most, those capabilities had to be regenerated
virtually from scratch.

GIS was an important element of the OEM mission. The OEM staff
had GIS software from ESRI and data about City facilities such as
schools, hospitals, and nursing homes. They could map flood
zones, evacuation routes, emergency transportation routes, and
shelter locations--information needed to begin to recover from
disaster. But now all this was gone.

New York City's experience--reconstructing its GIS capabilities
and then pushing those new capabilities to maximize efficiency--
is one that contains valuable lessons for every other
organization in the country that must deal with disaster
recovery, e specially in a post-September 11 world.

http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/winter0102articles/
winter0102gi fs/p1p2.jpg

By Friday, Sept. 14, the EOC moved to Pier 92, a large ship
terminal on the Hudson River. The mapping center within the EOC
was equipped with 20 GIS workstations and five plotters.

Perhaps the most valuable of these is the importance of data
sharing and data integration across an organization. That is the
strongly held view of Alan Leidner, director of Citywide GIS for
the New York City Department of Information Technology and
Telecommunications (DoITT). Leidner directed the mapping and GIS
recovery operations of the City and is an outspoken advocate of
GIS technology's abilities and potential. There are few things
more valuable that a city can do to prepare for disaster t han to
invest in GIS data and systems to share GIS capabilities, Leidner
argues.

For the first couple of days, Leidner and his team had only a
couple of workstations and a plotter from the Parks Department
and a small amount of City data with which to work. They also had
no permanent home and were forced to move twice in three da ys.
The City requested help from ESRI--already a vendor and
consultant to many New York City agencies including the Office of
Emergency Management--and from several hardware vendors. All
responded with a deluge of software, workstations, servers, plo
tters, and other equipment. By Friday, September 14, a more
permanent EOC was established on Pier 92, a large ship terminal
on the Hudson River. The mapping center within the EOC was
equipped with 20 GIS workstations and five plotters. Security was
h eavy, since the EOC itself was considered a prime target for
any further terrorist attacks; armed patrol boats kept watch from
the Hudson while soldiers with automatic weapons guarded the
streetside entrances.

Assembling and integrating GIS data for the EOC's mapping was the
first overwhelming task. Historically, the spatial data of New
York City was managed at the agency level. Interagency
communication was sometimes problematic. The City was in the
midst of developing a comprehensive enterprisewide GIS system,
but the system was not yet ready for use. All this meant that
data first had to be found and assembled from dozens of
departments and agencies in the country's largest city, as well
as from ot her government agencies outside the City, and from
vendors such as ESRI.

Among those departments with the most comprehensive data were the
New York City Department of Parks, the New York City Department
of Finance, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the New York
City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). DEP, under the
direction of another GIS champion, Wendy Dorf, had launched an
initiative several years earlier to create the City's first
accurate, planimetric basemap, generated in ArcInfo software from
digital orthophotos. This basemap is known as NYCM AP
(pronounced "nice map").

In some instances, finding data was simply a matter of luck.
ESRI's own data in its regional office at the Woolworth Building
was unavailable, since the building was in a restricted area. But
Dave LaShell, technical manager of ESRI's Boston office, had only
recently transferred from the New York City office and still had
his machine full of New York City data. LaShell and colleagues
Tom Schwartzman, Richard Laird, and Johan Herrlin loaded up a car
with the machine and as much other equipment as they could get
into it--including gas masks--and drove to New York to help out.
They were joined at Pier 92 by Susan Harwood, the New York City
sales manager; Chris Schielein, Ray Carnes, Tom Pederson, and
Anne Marie Flatley of the New York regional office, and Lori
Sheinvold of the Philadelphia office. Helping lead the emergenc y
response effort was Mike Tait, ESRI Internet services manager,
who happened to be in New York on Sept. 11, as was Kris
Goodfellow, media industry manager. Also joining in the mapping
efforts were City employees and staff from Plangraphics, Inc., an
ESRI Business Partner and contractor to the City to develop the
enterprise GIS system. In Redlands, the Technical Support staff
also went to 24-hour-a-day operation to support the mapping
center. ESRI employees from around the country eventually joi ned
the mapping team at various stages.

In those first hectic days, it was all mapping center staffers
could do to simply keep up with the demand for maps, using ArcGIS
software. The first maps were based on aerial photographs from
the New York State Emergency Management Office and satelli te
images from Space Imaging, also an ESRI Business Partner, which
was the only reliable data available. Then, simple street maps
were created with the aerial images and NYCMAP. Later, more
complex maps were needed, largely due to the growing awarene ss
in the EOC of what GIS was capable of doing; the more people knew
about GIS, the more they wanted its capability.

"People didn't realize that we were a GIS operation and that we
could do analysis for them or that we could answer their specific
questions," says Harwood. "But it didn't take long before people
were coming in and asking for custom maps that focused on
particular needs. Over time they began to request maps that were
more complex and involved GIS analysis." Some of these requests
were chilling: Harwood herself had to process a request to map
all the concrete slab buildings over 10,000 square feet south of
Canal Street, to be used as mortuary space.

New data trickled in from disparate sources, often by hand, since
there was no network connection from Pier 92, and using the
Internet for sensitive geographic data was deemed to be insecure
(although Geography Network provided census and other  demo
graphic data to the EOC). The geography department at Hunter
College contributed a significant amount of data as did the
City's Department of Planning (street centerlines and block and
lot numbers), the Department of Finance (property records), and t
he Department of Buildings.

Data also came in from the field: command post locations, vehicle
and pedestrian restrictions, utility outages, pedestrian and
vehicle access zones, subway and bus line status, and river
crossing access. This information was in high demand, and some
was updated several times a day. This data became part of a
growing list of standard map products, which in turn became a key
component for public information, used by Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani's office and posted on the New York City Web site.
The mapping center developed another set of maps to help with the
process of identifying damaged buildings, destroyed buildings,
those in danger of collapse, and buildings needing cleanup. Daily
updates of these maps were an important resource to pro vide to
both residential and commercial tenants who were shut out of
their buildings.

The mapping center was also producing custom ArcView maps to
respond to specific planning and analysis queries from City,
state, and federal agencies. These included light detection and
ranging (LIDAR)-based three-dimensional analysis maps of the deb
ris field at Ground Zero, to monitor shifts in the debris pile.
Thermal image maps helped federal urban search and rescue teams
and the New York City Fire Department determine the relative
distance of the fires to underground fuel storage tanks. Maps
locating the freon tanks and oil fuel tanks at the World Trade
Center site were created by overlaying the tank locations from
CAD drawings onto thermal infrared data that showed fires and hot
spots at Ground Zero.

One result of all this mapmaking and analysis was that within a
couple of weeks, the mapping center's system became unwieldy to
work with, since it contained hundreds of shapefiles, image
files, and ArcGIS map projects whose origin and metadata were
often suspect. At the beginning, there was no time to do anything
but crank out maps as quickly as possible, but such a system
could not last forever.

Streamlining Operations

ESRI staff in Redlands worked with the New York City team to
develop an online map request system that entered map requests
into a database and provided a prioritized queue to the mapping
staff. "We trained folks on how to use it and then wrote up a
quick user manual," says Tait. "It made it much easier to track
the status of a map request with all the specifics, including
contact information, right there."

The emergency mapping team also was able to leverage other map-
based applications. For example, affected City departments were
able to track events online with incident management software
from E-Team, an ESRI Business Partner, which also provided st
aff. The E-Team software is a Web-based emergency and event
management software system that uses ArcIMS.

Going Online Reduces Number in Line

The Emergency Management Online Locator System (EMOLS) was
another example of leveraging an application for new purposes.
Just before September 11, OEM had implemented EMOLS, a Web-based,
ArcIMS application that let New York City residents enter an a
ddress and see the location of the nearest emergency shelter in
the event of some natural disaster such as a hurricane. This
capability was easily pivoted, after the attacks, to allow
residents to find out whether they lived in a restricted sector
and whether they were subject to any utility outages. EMOLS is
available at

     http://www.nyc.gov/html/oem/html/emols/emols_wtc.html

But even as the workload began to become slightly less intense in
late September, it became obvious that a better, more
comprehensive system, with more horsepower, would need to be
implemented if the mapping center was to continue serving New
York City well. ArcSDE was the obvious solution to handling the
large, complex work flows and map products. "We were getting lots
of very high-resolution imagery," says Mike Tait. "People were
very attracted to the image map products, but the process of
creating these products slowed down mapmaking. We wanted to
implement ArcSDE to streamline that process and give us better
data management capabilities such as better cataloging and
administration procedures for updating certain data sets."

By early November, the mapping center had received more than
1,800 requests for maps, and it had generated more than 7,000
large-scale maps on plotters and many more thousands of small-
scale, 8 1/2- x 11-inch maps.

Value of GIS Demonstrated

Certainly the value of GIS was demonstrated by the events of
September 11 and afterward. Harwood says that any doubts anyone
had about the power of GIS were erased. "It was very important to
have the ability to rapidly create these maps--first simple ones,
later complex ones and GIS analysis," says Harwood. "It was
invaluable to have quick access to accurate maps from all of the
different agencies from all over the City, including live data,
and to be able to produce maps that were meaningful fo r the
rescue workers, the mayor's office, and the public."

A GIS for Managing a Disaster Needs to Respond Quickly
Much of the value of a disaster GIS involves quick response, with
data that is updated. Given that the OEM mapping center was
completely destroyed, for the initial few days very few maps were
available.

This lack of information led to confusion and a reliance on
intuitive judgment to make many decisions, but once information
became available, its value was realized as an essential
reference base. How many public agencies are prepared to quickly
resp ond with a disaster GIS? Are data sources readily available?
Are agencies prepared to immediately store their data? Who are
the people who can instantly mobilize into a 24x7 workforce?
All these are important questions that local government GIS users
should ask themselves.

GIS Is About Integration

There was much value in using GIS to integrate the data in New
York City. The GIS put all the layers of information together for
the first time. Departmental system data was used. People in a
disaster need to understand how all the information from d
ifferent departments is related geographically and how it
connects and describes the whole urban organism.
Tait says, "We need to recognize GIS is about integration and
shouldn't stop with the successful implementation of one or more
sets of functions. The good thing to come out of this is a
clarity in our minds about the positive role that GIS can play i
n normal activities and especially how it can have an even
greater impact if it's done in an enterprise context." He
advocates creating an enterprise vision for aggregating project
efforts and departmentalized data sets into an integrated system
that is available for all of the groups within an organization.

Other lessons include

During an emergency, there is a huge demand for making hard-copy
maps. They provide a kind of framework for organizing what was,
what is, and what will be needed. This means plotters and
printers that are both fast and durable are essential.
Substantial resources were made available from the greater GIS
community--users from the City, surrounding cities and states,
and the private sector. Federal agencies (USGS, NASA, and DoD)
were particularly helpful because they brought with them info
rmation and resource talent that could immediately assist. The
contributions of the local GIS user group, in bringing together
both data and volunteers, also should not be underestimated.
It is possible to bring together a complete GIS in a relatively
short time. This was helped by standardized procedures. For
example, data from many different data formats (vector, raster,
CAD, object, DBMS, etc.) was converted and integrated into a s
ingle ArcSDE database environment. Many off-the-shelf, mature
mapping and analysis tools were available and immediately usable
for creating almost all of the maps requested.

The Internet and Internet service mapping leveraged access
enormously because users could do it themselves.  It was
necessary to create (invent) some of the procedural work flows to
support the processing of map requests. This kind of map request
work flow should be well thought out beforehand and as automated
as possible.

Leadership is important. Alan Leidner, the New York City GIS
director, brought together a whole series of teams and stayed
with them day and night. His leadership motivated everyone.
In disasters, a sense of team spirit is created, and is needed.
The New York City disaster demonstrated the wonderful sense of
human cooperation that is possible. People helped each other and
worked hard. There was a special sense of humanness that c ame
out in many of the interpersonal communications. Interpersonal
relationships were created with people coming from as far away as
California and Minnesota to assist in the effort.