City completes GIS beta testing

By Charles Sowell  

MARCH 12, 2010 9:21 a.m. (0)

Greenville Fire Chief W.T. McDowell is in love with the city’s latest Geographic Information Services (GIS) Division invention.

Through that system, he gets real time situational awareness; a geeky term for the chief being able to know, as his trucks are rolling, if his vehicles can slip by an accident on I-385 to get to a fire or whether he should divert his crews to another route.

Another way to look at it is tying in all of the data available to various emergency agencies, adding things as diverse as National Weather Service radar plots, or a dollop of Twitter, and presenting it on the visual platter of a map.

Beta testing is all but finished now, less than six months after the idea first was deemed practicable.

The GIS platform is a civilian version of the military’s much vaunted command and control computer system. McDowell and other city officials dance around describing the system this way and are quick to note the general public can’t tap in for a peek.

But by tying in a mobile computer the chief can get a look at every street on ground level by using Google Earth and can look down from above or on the oblique by using Microsoft’s Bing mapping system. All of the city’s command fire vehicles are equipped to use the system.

Thus the chief would know if his firefighters are going to encounter a skylight on a rooftop while fighting a high-rise fire.

These tools, of course, are not real time. But the state DOT camera system is and that would be the view the chief would tap into to see if his trucks could make it past a wreck.

The system was developed at Greenville’s City Hall for the exorbitant sum of $600 (the cost of two copies of a software package), said Mark DePenning, GIS administrator. His department is working on a grant that would allow the city to expand the system to police vehicles.

Carmen Durham, GIS senior analyst, said the city’s computer division had to rebuild a server to handle the computing needs of the software system but the costs associated with this latest version of the city’s GIS mapping capability were minimal because they used city labor and city know-how.

Greenville was one of the nation’s first local governments to start developing GIS capabilities back in 1984, DePenning said.

The city is working with its GSI consultant Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) on the command and control GIS system. The company is based in Redlands, Calif., but the city does most of its business through the company’s Charlotte office.

“They were really interested in this on a local governmental level,” said DePenning. “ESRI donated their time and help on this project.”

“I’ve wanted to have something like this for years,” McDowell said. “But until recently the technology just wasn’t available.”

McDowell is aware of all that’s going on around him at any emergency scene, down to the level of where city crews are working on infrastructure.

“We can see where a hazardous materials spill is going to flow into a stream through the storm drains and get in front of it,” McDowell said.

“And, conversely, can see where the likely source of a spill might be based on where it is flowing into a stream,” said Durham.

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