In a pilot in May, the Alabama Department of Homeland Security (AL DHS) plotted floor plans and safety plans from two schools on Virtual Alabama to help school officials and first responders gain a common operating picture during a fire or other crisis.

Virtual Alabama is an implementation of Google Earth that contains government data. It uses a 3-D globe interface to retrieve government-owned photos, which are plotted on maps. 

A team from AL DHS went to the schools, did a visual inspection, took pictures of where items — such as gas bottles, fire extinguishers, smoke detectors, circuit breakers and dangerous chemicals — were located, and uploaded them into the system.

Now, first responders and school officials can download the photos and note their locations, which can guide first responders during heavy smoke, according to Buckhorn High School Principal Tommy Ledbetter.

From a virtual tour the school had on its Web site, the team from AL DHS was able to build a 3-D model of the school that could give SWAT teams having to enter the school an idea of what it looked like. The school’s security camera feeds are also populated and viewable on Virtual Alabama.

In September, the AL DHS will begin sending small teams to school districts to train superintendents, principals, security personnel, law enforcement and fire chiefs within the district how to upload and access the information from the school safety plans on the system. “We’ll upload all of the floor plans in that district, but then take one school that they pick and do everything from soup to nuts while the others observe,” said AL DHS Director Jim Walker. “Then [we’ll] send them off to do it, and then provide additional training as required.”

The pilot proved that it didn’t matter whether the school had computer-aided drawings of its floor plans, cameras or other data. “We wanted to show it doesn’t matter what you have, we can work with what you’ve got," Walker said. “Anything that you have will be an improvement once we take it and get it into the system.”

With a new building under construction at the time of the pilot and another currently under construction that will accommodate an additional 800 students, Virtual Alabama has given school safety officials an opportunity to look at how they will handle emergencies on the campus when the new building comes online next year, Ledbetter said.

Walker hopes having the state’s more than 1,500 public schools modeled in the system will increase their collaboration with the local fire departments, law enforcement, city planners and others. He hopes to have all the schools modeled in the system in the next 10 months.