How St. Louis County, Minnesota, Enhanced Wildfire Response by Modernizing Its GIS Data

St. Louis County, Minnesota, is the largest county east of the Mississippi River, encompassing a vast and diverse landscape that includes urban centers like Duluth, remote wilderness areas, and numerous rural communities. The county’s unique geography presents significant challenges for emergency management, particularly in the context of wildland fire risk.

When the call came to support a neighboring jurisdiction’s wildfire in 2021, St. Louis County staff noticed a critical gap in their own evacuation preparedness. Their geographic information system (GIS) for emergency incidents did not contain data for predefined evacuation zones, so if a major wildfire evacuation was necessary in their own jurisdiction, they would have to sketch out evacuation zone polygons on the fly. “After supporting the neighboring county through their wildfire, we realized we needed these mapping solutions to help ensure the safety of our residents in the event of a major wildfire,” said Matt Goodman, GIS principal in the Emergency Services Division of the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office. Working together with David Yapel from the county’s enterprise GIS group, Goodman used Esri’s ArcGIS technology as a foundation for building this new geospatial solution.
 

A key consideration was designing right-sized zones that accounted for the diversity of densely populated lakeshores, sparsely populated forest land, varied topography, and existing road networks. “We approached it by automatically generating very small, granular polygons that encompassed each individual address and the road it was accessed from, and then we worked through a series of polygon ‘dissolves’ to reach an acceptable size and geometry in ArcGIS Pro,” explained Goodman. The guiding principle was to delineate evacuation zones of a size, road mileage, and property-density that could be reasonably evacuated by a single crewed vehicle within a one-to-three-hour time frame.

To ensure the zones were the right size and navigationally logical, St. Louis County’s former GIS intern, Tony Maras, manually refined them by merging, dissolving, and adjusting the polygon boundaries. The number of evacuation zones was consolidated from 20,000 zones to 1,500 zones covering the entirety of St. Louis County. The methodology determined geospatially backed zones based on roads, addresses, land coverage, and the natural topography of the county. Large rivers and lakes were often used as zone boundaries as they act as natural fire breaks. Jurisdictional boundaries that included municipalities and fire department areas were also considered when determining evacuation zone boundaries.

With the evacuation zone data complete, Maras set to work building a suite of ArcGIS Online web mapping applications that presented the data to the public in a simple and concise manner. In consultation with area wildfire agencies and the county’s emergency management staff, they settled on three escalatory evacuation alert levels: Ready, Set, Go.
 

Shortly after the GIS project was completed, which included a tabletop exercise, a significant real-world test arrived. In May of 2025, three significant simultaneous wildfires ignited within 24 hours of each other and took off, ultimately leading to one of the largest evacuation efforts the region had ever seen.

St. Louis County’s new GIS-driven evacuation solution yielded major improvements in preparedness, response, and public communication across the region. A key driver for this initiative was regional collaboration. Recognizing the importance of interagency coordination, St. Louis County worked closely with neighboring counties to build similar data and to standardize their evacuation zone schemas, symbology, and data sharing practices. REST end points for their feature services were mutually shared, allowing seamless integration of each county’s data into public-facing applications, regardless of jurisdictional boundaries. This ensured that residents and responders could access consistent information, even if a wildfire straddled or ran across county boundaries. This publicly accessible web service is also exposed to, and utilized by, third-party wildfire tracking apps like Watch Duty.
 

The main evacuation zone web application is embedded in a publicly accessible ArcGIS Hub site that also hosts other relevant information for major incidents. On the Hub site, residents can use a web application to enter their address and instantly view their evacuation zone and its current status.

Internally accessible applications support real-time use of the evacuation zones during an incident, including an editor application through which emergency response staff can update the status of evacuation zones as needed.

Additionally, county staff and regional partners had access to an internal dashboard created with ArcGIS Dashboards displaying real-time updates of unfolding wildfire situations. It provides access to multiple maps simultaneously as well as metrics of how many zones are under evacuation advisories, how many addresses need to be evacuated, estimated counts of affected residents and structures, and more. Fire personnel and evacuators in the field also have access to hard-copy maps of the zones as a backstop in case of connectivity issues.
 

By proactively addressing gaps in evacuation planning, fostering regional collaboration, and leveraging GIS technology, the county has built a resilient, scalable, and user-friendly system that enhances public safety and operational efficiency.

“As the county enterprise GIS manager, I am proud of how geospatial thinking influences our departments,” David Yapel said. “Neighboring counties have expressed interest in adopting our wildfire evacuation model, and the best practices are being shared regionally. This approach is seen as a template for wildfire evacuation planning in similar rural and wilderness settings.”