ENHANCING DISASTER PLANNING AND EMERGENCY RESPONSE WITH LOCATION-BASED INTELLIGENCE
The Dewberry Hurricane Preparedness Team, a subgroup of the Hazard Engineering Services group, assists federal, state and county authorities by conducting various types of hurricane and natural disaster impact studies, including vulnerability analyses, evacuation planning, post-storm assessments and many more hazard preparedness analyses. Dewberry studies serve as an important baseline for decision making during the disaster preparedness, response and recovery processes.
Using TerraGo software has enabled Dewberry to alter the way data is presented to clients, as most of the users are not GIS professionals, providing the ability to not only access the data, but to also interact with it to make critical decisions. The Dewberry team now uses GeoPDF maps and imagery to present study findings to clients in the disaster planning phase or to provide location-based intelligence to emergency managers responding to a crisis event.
The GeoPDF maps can include storm surge inundation, evacuation zones, critical facilities and community infrastructure, roadway networks, satellite imagery and much more. Map features are not only displayed on the map for visualization purposes, but they can also be queried to obtain information about the object or feature, providing critical information that assists emergency managers in the decision making process.