GIS EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS FOR A STATE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

There is an increasing importance of proper and efficient emergency management preparedness for natural disasters for entities such as Geological Surveys with modern technology. In order to tackle an emergency natural disaster, there must be steps required to properly prepare an agency, organization, etc. for a natural disaster in our current day and age– in terms of the digital realm. As the years advance, so does technology and the incorporations that state agencies such as Geological Surveys have with it. It has become increasingly necessary to make the adequate preparations in regards to this. In this scenario, you must fully assess the situation in terms of what your full inventory of resources available is and if you don’t have the resources, then take action to fill in the gaps so that all possible bases are covered in any scenario thrown your way. In June 2017, an Earthquake emergency preparedness scenario in Arkansas was prepared and executed amongst several agencies. The effort put forth from the technical team at the Arkansas Geological Survey was through inventorying all of our digital resources, reallocating the digital resources to a central and portable location, and putting those digital resources to relevant. The planning products prepared by our staff for this exercise, which assisted local and state response agencies, included Geographic Information Systems maps with a wide variety of general yet readily accessible data so that maps can be made quickly and easily catered to the specific need at that time. The key impact of this digital emergency preparedness is to be prepared when disaster strikes. Minor issues such as having gaps in our data arose in the exercise. However, by performing extra quality assurance through identification and reallocation of our digital resources we were able to adapt and overcome these unplanned situations.