In a world increasingly beset by natural and man-made emergencies, it's hard to imagine a more striking or beneficial use of GIS than in matters of public safety. One way of using GIS is as a "decomplicating machine." With it you can organize, analyze, and display-in all kinds of situations and environments. As we see from the articles in this special section, GIS works effectively in all four phases of emergency management: preparation, mitigation, response, and recovery.

During severe snowstorms, Buffalo, New York, uses GIS for tracking and communicating the status of street conditions and storm-damaged structures and to inventory snow-dumping locations as well as maintain a map history of the response effort. The City of Medellín, Colombia, has implemented one safety and emergency telephone number, the purpose of which is to unite City and State officials under one technical solution that would facilitate effective and efficient response to citizens' calls, channeling them to the attention of the proper authority. For the 2002 Winter Olympics, Salt Lake City, Utah, worked with numerous State and federal agencies to establish the Utah Olympic Public Safety Command for which GIS delivered accurate, relevant, and up-to-date data to all the people keeping an eye on this world-class event. Arizona's Maricopa County Department of Emergency Management uses GIS to help provide communitywide education, planning, coordination, and continuity of government to protect lives, property, and the environment in the event of a major emergency, while the Maricopa County Emergency Operations Center uses GIS to manage any emergency incident in near real time.

Visit www.esri.com/public_safety for additional case studies.