Just as facilities have a life cycle that requires informed management, emergencies have a life cycle of their own that demand a deep understanding of spatial information for effective management.
Mitigate - Prepare - Respond - Recover
These stages in the emergency management process are familiar to every public safety agency and security official around the world. Effective mitigation reduces the chances of an emergency, thorough preparation saves lives and reduces damage, swift and accurate response minimizes risk and loss from the occurance of an emergency, and recovery is necessary until things are back to normal or repurposed.
GIS is an effective tool throughout the emergency life cycle.
Most public safety and security concerns are spatial concerns—proximity to dangerous venues or safe havens, routing of emergency vehicles, interior and exterior evacuation routes and scenario planning. By seeing data in a spatial context, emergency responders, inspectors and commanders across agencies can understand critical infrastructure and be prepared to provide a better tactical response for mission success.
Managing this information throughout its lifecycle can be a considerable challenge. All too often, building information is not available in the instant it is needed because of the complex workflows needed to manage, store and retrieve it. Traditional building drawings provide a highly detailed view of individual floors, but these floor plans are often out of date and difficult to access.
Moreover, conventional views of the building ignore critical spatial data such as proximity to hydrants and standpipes or emergency access and egress. PenBay has developed a series of tools to extend the power of GIS inside the building footprint addressing public safety and security concerns by revealing critical infrastructure.
InVision SecureSM offers tools for planning, analysis, situational awareness, enabling of field operations, and data management, delivering operational value to a variety of Public Safety entities. Delivered as a suite of software applications and data collection services that bring the building into the common operational picture, these solutions are aimed at supporting Police, Fire, OEM and Counterterrorism wherever their workflows occur: in the office, the field, or the command center.
CASE STUDIES:
FIRE DEPARTMENT OF NEW YORK (1.08MB pdf)
CITY OF BOSTON (1.27MB pdf)
CITY OF PHILADELPHIA (2.05MB pdf)
