In case you haven’t seen the news – we had a lot of rain Last Friday. A hurricane hit Florida and then proceeded to drench a large portion of the world I Inhabit
I was fine. Chattanooga was fine. North East Tennessee and Western North Carolina aren’t. The more I read up that also included parts of South Carolina and Georgia. A lot of people missing. A lot of rain. A lot of Mud.
I’ve never worked an Emergency situation. That’s always something I’ve wanted to do just to see how it would work. I’m familiar with Emergency protocols and chain of command things – just something I’ve ever done especially with GIS
Anyway – this all kicked up a long buried memory from way back. I was working for the feds and there was to be a mock disaster at a nuclear power plant. This was probably early 2000’s and long before you were actively putting things on the internet. My world usually revolved around producing paper maps as a data delivery mechanism. Word came down and there was a large group of people wanting to be involved with the Emergency GIS end. Another adjacent group (full of younger more energetic people) was picked to be provide GIS Support. One guy whose name I can’t remember was picked and we talked. He brought his shiny new laptop and I gave him a ton of shapefiles and aerial imagery.
The day after the event he came back and I asked how it had went and he wasn’t super happy. They had a meeting before the event and everyone knew what they were supposed to do. He went into the Command Center and got plugged in. Maps were at the ready to print. People were hovering with radios and everyone probably had something electronic that had blinking lights. The bells goes off and they guy leading the exercise immediately throws the breaker on the Command Center and it goes dark. No Electricity. Printer won’t print. Network shuts down. Things that hadn’t been charged went uncharged. The point being you had to bring all your tools ready…… like a giant paper map in the case of GIS. Plus you couldn’t pretend you were going to have anything useful there like electricity. I chuckled. He laughed a little.
A few years ago I was at another local meeting and the GIS director for a town came in to do a talk. The town had experienced a wildfire and the first thing that had happened was someone just asked for a map. Then a fire came roaring down the street which left the entire department ripping computers out of the building and riding to location B. They started working on maps and Location B came under threat – so everyone again ran to a new location. Probably at some point they lost power and internet. The discussion at the end was “We needed a paper map”.
Paper would have been a tough sell this weekend give the 30 inches of rain the region received. A laptop would have been a hard sell given there hasn’t been electricity in the some areas for 4 days. There is just starting to be a glimmer if internet so if everything was in the cloud it was going to remain there.
Anyway – no point to this just “Have a Paper map”. Maybe even Shapefiles.
