Intelligent Emergency Response

Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas) is a subsidiary of Sempra Energy that has served natural gas to customers throughout Southern California for more than 140 years. Its Emergency Operations Center (EOC) is responsible for coordinating response efforts when a major service disruption occurs.

SoCalGas staff extended their use of GIS by employing ArcGISSM Online to deploy Operations Dashboard for ArcGIS to the EOC. When an incident occurs, EOC staff use ArcGIS Online to locate the incident and perform an impact analysis of the area. A geoprocessing service analyzes SoCalGas’s customer and infrastructure data and summarizes the results. Within minutes, the EOC can see where an incident has been reported and the impact summary within Operations Dashboard. The impact summary includes the number of customers affected, miles of high- and medium-pressure pipes, and critical infrastructure within the impact area. 

Operations Dashboard and ArcGIS Online provide a common platform for personnel throughout SoCalGas to respond to emergencies. Whether staff are in the field coordinating with first responders, at a regional gas emergency center, or in the EOC, everyone has access to the same live information about the nature of the event and its impacts. Staff can focus their efforts on directing response activities and making informed decisions that are based on the most current information available. SoCalGas can also quickly identify any critical customers (such as schools or hospitals) that might be affected and prioritize resources to mitigate impacts to such organizations. The success of the EOC solution has caused SoCalGas to explore how it can be extended to other areas of the organization for pipeline distribution integrity compliance.

“In emergency response, people want info right away. This system gives us a communication platform to ensure everyone is looking at the same info at the same time.”  - Os Arango Project Manager, SoCalGas