Incident Geeks Wanted
It's almost getting old — the everyday stream of media telling us about today's superstars of technology. Smartphones with GPS, cloud computing, social media and geoservices have become everyday news stories. Not surprisingly, these technologies also are a useful part of our everyday lives. And what we are learning to use at home is teaching us to expect that same kind of capability when we go to work. This is particularly true for those of us in the wildfire world.
So how do we develop a thoughtful way of incorporating these technologies into our time-compressed, remote, rugged and demanding responder environment? What's on our assessment checklist for the tech gadgets, gizmos, tools and services offered up for sale? Questions arise such as: What's available? Will it make my mission safer or more effective? What does it cost? How will it work with what I already have? Will it be around for a while?
A starting point for this analysis is to revisit our situational awareness (SA) goals. SA isn't a new concept, but it is a more recent term for describing the process of tracking our environment in the context of our goals. Wildfire SA drives the 10 Standard Firefighting Orders and 18 Watchout Situations — it's why we monitor weather, check the daily status sheets and brief the crew before tooling up. However, improving our SA with today's technology requires systematically thinking through what information we want to track and how we intend to acquire, review, verify, share and use that information.
One powerful technology tool coming into use is the common operational picture (COP), which allows us to electronically gather, assemble and share disparate pieces of information about an incident.
COPs come from battleground technology and follow the military definition of "a single identical display of relevant information shared by more than one command. A common operational picture facilitates collaborative planning and assists all echelons to achieve situational awareness."
Many components can integrate into a common operational picture.
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Commercially available COPs are making their way into the market and are designed to overcome some of the weaknesses of single silo software that only allows you to see portions of critical information. COPs are GIS-based and usually custom-designed to bring geographic, textual, database, resource and incident data together in one application.
COPs are not necessarily limited to the response phase of the emergency. They also are useful in pre-planning, mitigation tracking, evacuation planning, rehab, fire prediction and damage assessment. COPs share some of the following characteristics:
- They integrate different types of data sources.
- They are real-time.
- They allow responders and command-and-control to share the same view.
COPs also can take a broader perspective view that encompasses a region such as a geographic area command center with multiple incidents, a state view such as VIPER (Virginia Interoperability Picture for Emergency Responders) or a national view. Boulder, Colorado, offers an example of a COP used by local emergency managers at http://gisweb2.ci.boulder.co.us/emcop.
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