Greetings. Been an ESRI/GIS user for a couple years and an Emergency Services Forum user for many years. This is my first time on a GIS Forum site, but since that is where my life is heading, thought I might come play in this pool.
Anyway, I have read a number of threads and saw that several members of this forum are using GIS in Search & Rescue. If there is anyone who can provide some insight and suggestions into how they use GIS for SAR (or Incident Response/Management in general), I would love to pick some brains.
I am an 11 year veteran of Emergency Services in California. I have worked Ambulance, First Response, Swiftwater Rescue, Rope Rescue, Helicopter Rescue/Medical, and Ground Search. Recently I find myself being "pushed" toward the Emergency Management side of things. In 2010 GIS stated making inroads into our SAR Team and I found myself on the front line, fighting old-timer notions about technology and trying to implement GIS as a mainstay of Incident Mitigation. It has been a slow process, with very few interested in learning about it, using it, or funding it.
But I am 100% invested in it. As a result of my use of GIS in SAR I recently started to go back to college in an effort to get a degree in GIS (the local college has such a program which after 35 units I have holding a 3.6 GPA). I am using GIS routinely at college and for SAR, having successfully utilized GIS on several Wilderness Searches and Swiftwater Recoveries. Now I am in the process of making a HUGE leap. The college has expressed an interest in collaborating with SAR, sending GIS students to us for "work experience" (under the leadership of properly certified and experience Incident Managers). My SAR Team's new leadership is interested to devoting some time, energy, and money to get GIS implemented. I have some grant funding lined up to move us forward. Hopefully, by summer I should have a newly created "Incident Management and Mapping Team"... at least that is my hope.
For the foreseeable future I am working with several programs for the sake of simplicity: ArcExplorer, Nat GEO Topo, DNR Garmin, and a hodgepodge of other related applications. We tried CIMMS, but that didn't pan out. I have Arc10, but with so few on my SAR Members GIS-savy, am not integrating it to heavily yet. Grant money should provide us with a decent amount of new hardware in the near future.
I may have put myself too deep into this. But, as I try to move forward in using GIS for SAR (and maybe Emergency Management in general), any suggestions or ideas from the experienced folks here? Any websites, books, programs, etc I should look into? Anyone have any experience with this?
Thanx for any insight.
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