Historic Annual Parade Uses Modernized Situational Awareness

The Pasadena Fire Department (PFD) supports the annual Tournament of Roses (TOR) Parade and Rose Bowl Game in Pasadena, California. For the events, an influx of visitors expands the city's population from 142,250 to over 800,000. Accommodating the parade route and viewers requires significant alterations to the typical street network, which makes it a challenging landscape to navigate, even for those familiar with the area.

For 2019, PFD sought to transform its situational awareness and emergency response by replacing bulky map books with an accurate and comprehensive digital map of the event environment and surrounding areas. PFD sought the ability to see the locations of PFD emergency response units in real time to more effectively dispatch them to incident calls at the events. 

PFD Captain Oscar Sepulveda III applied his ArcGIS Pro skills to create new layers of event-specific details from AutoCAD-rendered maps provided by the TOR Association. Using Drone2Map for ArcGIS, drone-captured imagery of the parade-ready area was transformed into web map overlays, providing details of the as-built environment. With Collector for ArcGIS, accurate location data was collected for assets of interest such as grandstands, emergency response vehicles, and the zones to which PFD responders were assigned. ArcGIS Tracker was used to capture the locations of responders in real time. In the multiagency command center, Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS displayed the authoritative digital map with the real-time locations of PFD responders. 

Collaboration between the more than 19 federal, state, and local agencies that support the TOR events was better coordinated by the availability of a single authoritative digital map. The ability to turn on and off layers of detail relevant to each situation facilitated greater insight for responding effectively to calls. Dispatchers were able to identify the unit nearest a call—considering impediments along the route—and the responders reached their destinations more quickly and efficiently, aided by the digital map. After conducting a post incident analysis of the events, PFD concluded that using the Esri ArcGIS platform contributed to the success of the strategic and tactical objectives associated with the 2019 TOR events, and it will be carried forward to 2020.