Oregon State Police Implement ArcIMS for Disaster Management

In the State of Oregon, the primary responsibility for coordinating natural disaster responses lies with county emergency managers. State-wide coordination of disaster planning and response is especially challenging because there are some counties that encompass vast areas of land and have very few people. Harney County in the southeast corner of the State, for example, comprises an area of 10,228 square miles but only has 7,500 residents. By contrast, Multnomah County in the metro Portland area is home to more than 635,000 people but only occupies an area of 465 square miles. That's why the Oregon State Police Office of Emergency Management (OEM) wants to empower county emergency managers to coordinate multijurisdictional disaster response strategies more easily and effectively by providing real-time, State-wide, interactive data and maps via the Internet.

"Our vision is to establish a Web-based system for the emergency management and emergency services communities that will provide online tools for every phase of emergency and crisis management," says OEM Director Myra Thompson Lee.

OEM took the first step toward this vision in September 2000 when it contracted with GeoNorth, an Esri Business Partner, to implement an ArcIMS pilot project. The prototype uses the standard HTML viewer that ships with ArcIMS to query and view flood and earthquake hazard information. This includes themes such as river basins, jurisdictional boundaries, and earthquake faults maintained by the state Information Resources Management Division as part of the Oregon GIS Library. The viewer contains standard out-of-the-box functionality including zoom, pan, identify, geocoding, distance measuring, multiple map feature graphical selection, buffering, and a printable map.

It is very important to OEM to start with a thin client viewer because many emergency managers in rural counties have slow Internet connections and antiquated computers. A serverside solution can provide snappy performance with a standard Web browser.

For more information, contact Obhie Robinson, Oregon Office of Emergency Management (e-mail: orobinso@oem.state.or.us), or Andy Sloop, GeoNorth (e-mail: asloop@geonorth.com).

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