How Santa Cruz County’s SAFER App Enhances Emergency Response

Santa Cruz County, California, located 60 miles south of San Francisco, is known for its stunning natural beauty, vibrant surf culture, and diverse recreational offerings. However, it has also faced increasing natural disasters, reflecting a global trend of more frequent and severe weather events due to climate change. In the last eight years, the county has experienced five federally declared disasters due to fire or weather. The CZU Lightning Complex fire in 2020 destroyed over 1,000 structures and led to the evacuation of 45,000 people. In 2023, atmospheric river events brought severe rain, flooding, and high winds, causing widespread damage and over 70 road closures.

Effective disaster response relies on situational awareness to support decision-making. Emergency management professionals need real-time answers to questions like, “How many people are being evacuated?”, “How many roads are closed?”, “Where should shelters be located?” and “What critical infrastructure is at immediate risk?" This is where geographic information system (GIS) technology can help by providing current information and the ability to consolidate a variety of data sources.

To address these needs, Dave Reid, the director of the county’s Office of Response, Recovery, and Resiliency (OR3), partnered with county GIS staff to develop a web application called SAFER (Situational Awareness for Emergency Response).

“It became clear that we needed to integrate multiple sources of GIS data into a single app, and the app should support all hazard types,” shared Reid. “We also wanted something we could share with the public.”

County staff leveraged ArcGIS Experience Builder, a highly configurable solution for building web apps without writing code, to develop SAFER.

The first iteration of SAFER was created during the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fire to display evacuation population estimates and fire perimeters on the Emergency Operations Center’s (EOC) media display wall. The app was further enhanced during the 2023 atmospheric river events to incorporate maps and information that aid response to flooding, wind, and tidal impacts.

“SAFER development is an ongoing effort, and after each EOC activation, we take what we learned and make improvements,” said Paul Garcia, GIS analyst and the lead architect of SAFER. “Experience Builder is an amazing platform for data visualization, and it also allowed us to create a mobile version of SAFER for the public with minimal effort.”

SAFER provides situational awareness by integrating maps and data from county, state, and federal agencies, utilities, public mapping sites, and social media into a single platform. At the county level, SAFER incorporates data including critical facilities, evacuation zones, potential shelter locations, public works infrastructure, road closure status, sandbag locations, and areas prone to repetitive flooding.

“One of the most leveraged features in the app is the embed widget that provides us the ability to combine and display mapping resources from internal and external sources,” said Garcia. 

Additionally, SAFER includes the delineations of tsunami run-up areas, locations of prescribed burns, active fire perimeters, and real-time images from ALERTCalifornia monitoring cameras. Federal data integrated in SAFER also includes flood hazard areas from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), along with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

To monitor power outage areas and affected population counts, the GIS team used data from PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric), along with data from public mapping apps such as Waze for traffic conditions, Ventusky for weather, and Esri’s Wildfire Aware.

There are five pages in SAFER that include two map viewing modes, a summary page, a links page, and a social media feed. The maps and layers in SAFER can be viewed in either single-view or dual-view mode. 

“SAFER is designed to be easy to use and flexible as it supports a broad audience looking at multiple sources of information in different emergency management scenarios,” said Garcia.

The single-view mode enables a detailed examination of mapped information such as fire perimeters or flood zones and includes key metrics alongside the map. For instance, the flood map in single-view mode features a dashboard built with ArcGIS Dashboards, displaying trend analysis on river gauge height readings along with the FEMA flood zone map. ArcGIS Dashboards is a configurable web app used to create dynamic dashboards to monitor people, services, and assets in real time.

The dual-view mode is strictly map-focused and allows for side-by-side comparisons of maps like air quality and wind direction or road closures and evacuation zones. Buttons along the top control default map pairings. For example, clicking the Flood button will set the left map to display FEMA flood zones and the right map to show precipitation based on weather radar. Dual view mode also provides the ability to create custom map pairings by selecting from a list of map resources adjacent to the maps.

“Dual view mode makes displaying information on the EOC media wall easier—it reduces the number of browsers that need to be open, and it gives the user the ability to see features side-by-side without having to turn layers off and on,” said Garcia.

The summary page contains multiple dashboards that display information without a mapping component for quick reference, such as the number of people under evacuation orders or without power, stream gauges for monitoring river heights, a list of road closures, and weather alerts from NOAA.

The links page includes resources that cannot be embedded in ArcGIS Experience Builder or that function better in a full browser window. Rounding out the offerings in SAFER is a page dedicated to social media feeds, including alerts and communication from state and local governments, as well as local fire and law agencies.

“The goal of SAFER is to have a one-stop shop for all emergency management-related information during an event to speed up the decision-making process,” said Reid. “At one point during the 2023 atmospheric river events, we were dealing with evacuations, power outages, road closures, high winds, significant downpour, along with tidal impacts. Understanding the timing of when each of these would be at their peak and what areas were at greatest risk was critical.” 

When SAFER was made available to the public during a storm event in 2024, it received over 80,000 views during the first weekend. “SAFER has been well received by the public and plays a critical role in emergency management as our primary situational awareness resource for internal and external stakeholders,” said Reid.

Reid added that, as the county sits on the front lines of climate change-related disasters, they are faced with dynamic and expanding incidents that can impact the entire geographic region. As such, future projects include creating an internal-facing version of SAFER in ArcGIS Enterprise that will include damage assessment data collected by building inspectors and CERT (Community Emergency Response Teams) using ArcGIS Survey123. This version will also have maps of the locations of vulnerable populations like those receiving in-home support services.