The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was originally billed as a way to jump-start investments into fixing major infrastructure problems looming on the horizon and drive adoption of technology that would make the country more competitive in the global economy.

But some of the money set aside for broadband adoption, specifically the mapping of underserved and unserved areas, could provide benefits beyond economic development, such as improved emergency response times. 

In this case, the major problem concerns inaccurate address records that complicate emergency responders’ efforts to provide help in emergencies as quickly as possible, and some localities lack the funding to update address files. That's where the broadband funding comes in.

In December 2009 for example, the Oregon Public Utility Commission received a $2.1 million grant for broadband mapping. Of that the Oregon Geospatial Enterprise Office is using $274,000 to begin building a data set of the approximately 3.4 million addresses in the state, which could benefit local emergency responders. “We’ll create those address points and then the emergency response community will have a much more accurate way to get from point A to point B than they do now,” said Cy Smith, Oregon’s GIS coordinator. 

So far, the state has collected addresses from 21 counties for the statewide map and has contracted with Navteq to provide data for 11 additional counties. Address data for the four remaining counties will have to be generated from scratch to be used in the map. “They’re either in paper form or they may be in digital form in a flat file, but they don’t have any latitude or longitude associated with them so that we can put them on a map,” Smith said.

Once all the counties’ geospatial information has been collected by the state, it will make using that data at the state level much easier. “We’re a small shop, so we don’t have the manpower for every single data request that would come, because there’s got to be 80 some state agencies,” said Eric Bohard, the GIS manager for Clackamas County.

Once the statewide mapping effort is completed, that data will be accessible to the counties. Bohard said wildfires are probably the biggest natural disaster threat the state faces. And though the GIS office maps the county, it doesn’t provide data on what’s in other counties. “So once this is all aggregated, we’re going to have a more comprehensive view for the fire managers and for our [Emergency Operations Center] for modeling and for actual activation [regarding] what’s going on and what’s out there,” he said.

Also in December 2009, the California Geographic Information Officer’s (GIO) office received a $1 million grant from the state’s Emergency Management Agency to create a statewide data set containing map points of locations of critical infrastructure, command centers, schools, businesses, houses and the locations of vulnerable populations to improve situational awareness during disasters.

The project will begin in July 2010. A first round will input counties’ existing data, while in a second phase the GIO expects to assist counties that don’t have complete access to all their parcels. Once the project is completed, county agencies, including 911 call centers, will have access to the data, Bill Maile, a spokesman for the GIO’s office, said in an e-mail.

[Photo courtesy of Barry Bahler/FEMA.]