Emergency Management Hazard Locator

Having good situational awareness information is vitally important to today’s emergency managers. The state of technology and the mapping industry are evolving rapidly, therefore making access to information more prevalent. Emergency Management magazine partnered with Esri to leverage advances in technology and bring situational awareness information directly to its website through the Hazard Locator map.

We’ve taken some of the content that you may have seen during the 2009 and 2010 All-Hazards/All-Stakeholders Summits and made it available in this viewer. Current real-time hazard information is provided from authoritative sources like the U.S. Geological Survey’s Natural Hazards Support System, Pacific Disaster Center, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Demographics information such as social vulnerability and tapestry segmentation as well as base maps are provided by Esri. Modern sources for situational awareness from social media, including Twitter and YouTube, also are displayed on the map.

The mapping application is based on the viewer that Emergency Management magazine highlighted in its Gulf of Mexico oil spill coverage. These same real-time information feeds are also used inside emergency management agencies like Virginia’s Interoperability Picture for Emergency Response system as well as Virtual Beverly Hills. Look for more updates in the coming year!