The Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist
Attacks Upon the United States stated that the U.S. government needed to move from a culture of "need to know" to one
of "need to provide." Coordination among responding organizations is vital to successfully divert and mitigate disasters. Central to this is the seamless sharing of unclassifed
information among organizations. Conventional DOD operations systems do not support interoperability with civilian
organizations that lead missions of defense support of civil
authorities, but alternatives are available.2
"Secrecy stifes oversight, accountability, and information sharing. Unfortunately, all the current organizational
incentives encourage overclassifcation. This balance should
change . . . . The President should lead a government-wide
effort to bring the major national security institutions into
the information revolution, turning a mainframe into a
decentralized network. The obstacles are not technological."3
Civilian authorities employ numerous tools that enable
interagency team members to rapidly share, view, and
understand the operating environment, therefore improving the quality of information provided to decisionmakers.
Department of Homeland Security information management standards and the effcient use of existing tools make
this possible. Any Open Geospatial Consortium®-compliant
platform is the tool to use. Locally provided resources vary
broadly, but are typically based on Environmental Systems
Research Institute® (ESRI) Flex viewer or Google Earth™
Enterprise. Certifcates of networthiness for these tools
exist, reducing the effort of those who use them.
NORTHCOM is a leader in the feld of shared situational awareness. DOD and interagency partner users
may register for access to the NORTHCOM Situational
Awareness Geospatial Environment at . It is the unclassifed, common operational
picture for DOD and contains vast amounts of dynamic (live)
and static data.
Advances in information technology mean that data feeds
are more common than ever and are accessible via Open
Geospatial Consortium-compliant tools. Examples include
information on—
■ Earthquakes.
■ Wildfres (fre lines).
■ Flooding.
■ Hurricane tracks.
■ Storm surge models.
■ Plume models.
■ Blue Force tracking.
■ Weather.
■ Traffc cameras.
■ Traffc status (road closures).
■ Stream gauges.
■ Operational data feeds.
May–August 2013
The need to fnd a report and transcribe it for use in a
local viewer has been reduced since many reports are fed
directly to the end user's Web-based map. The FEMA Geospatial Information and Services page at and the U.S. Geological Survey emergency operations portal at are
starting points for event-specifc data feeds.
Technology is extremely useful, but it may fail at a critical point. The intrinsic value of a hardcopy map cannot be
overstated; it can be folded, placed in a pocket, thrown onto a
dashboard, rained on, hit by shrapnel, partially burned, and
even used as a small personal sun or rain shelter. A hardcopy map is light, compact, and often more robust than its
high-tech counterpart. Technology should be embraced, but
some reliable tools that are less fashy still play an important role and cannot be replicated on a computer screen.
Hardcopy maps are one of those tools.
"Technology should be embraced,
but some reliable tools that are less
fashy still play an important role
and cannot be replicated on a
computer screen."
TerraGo GeoPDF ® at is a valuable asset for responders. It allows users to annotate digital
maps, turn layers of information on or off, and view global
positioning system tracks. When forces are disconnected
from their headquarters, these products may be printed
on local printers rather than large plotters. Although DOD
geospatial engineers can create specialized products that
support specifc requirements, the U.S. Geological Survey is
the authoritative source for federal mapping of the United
States. A large portion of the agency's map inventory is in
GeoPDF format, ready for the end user to employ.
Smartphone technology, although not widely used by federal agencies, is making an impact. The U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers (USACE) Engineer Research and Development Center has developed a handheld feld data collection
application to speed information sharing from the incident
response location to the leaders responsible for force employment. The USACE mobile information collection application
was deployed during the Mississippi River foods in the
spring of 2011 and during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. During the 2011 foods, 50 smartphones were deployed to seven
counties, garnering more than 12,000 photographs, videos,
and notes that were then transmitted within seconds to map
viewers from various commands. The power of this tool is
indisputable. Although DOD has not fully transitioned to
smartphone technology, organizations such as the Engineer
Research and Development Center continue to develop applications to improve disaster response and recovery efforts.
Engineer 19