Mapping Emergencies: 9-1-1 through to the EOC (David Hamilton, Daniel Stevens)

Within the City of Vancouver, police, fire and ambulance dispatch are managed through disparate Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems.   As such, the ability to share incident information between these public safety agencies can be problematic.  This issue is not unique to the City of Vancouver, and is in fact seen in many urban areas around the world.  Through GIS, E-Comm has developed a web-based situational awareness system designed to bridge the gap between the disparate CAD systems.  The City of Vancouver’s Emergency Operations Centre (EOC), like many other EOC’s, likewise faces the challenge of bringing incident and resource status information together in a seamless, real-time and meaningful way for decision-makers.  Events such as the annual Celebration of Light fireworks show that draw hundreds of thousands of spectators to the downtown core keep both dispatch and EOC workers in Vancouver extremely busy.  Having these staff working with critical information in separate systems not only makes response operations challenging, but makes it very difficult to pull data together for after-action reporting.  The City of Vancouver Office of Emergency Management has embarked on an integration project to bring data from these and other systems together using EmerGeo’s mapping system via the City’s E Team and E-Comm’s E 2MV  applications. The presenters will describe these systems and how they are bringing it all together using open geo-spatial technology.