GIS in emergency management

Hoetmer defines emergency management as the discipline and profession of applying science, technology, planning, and management to deal with extreme events that can injure or kill large numbers of people, do extensive damage to property, and disrupt community life (Drabek and Hoetmer 1991). Recently, there has been increased interest in mitigating the effects of these extreme events, and this is exemplified by the United Nations’ declaration of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) in 1990 and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) National Mitigation Strategy: Partnerships for Building Safer Communities in the USA. In dealing with these extreme events, many of the critical problems that arise are inherently spatial. Whether an analyst is assessing the potential impact of a hazard, or an emergency manager is identifying the best evacuation routes during a disaster, or a civil engineer is planning a rebuilding effort following a disaster, all of these individuals face tasks with a strong spatial component. For this reason, geographical space is a valuable framework for reasoning about many problems that arise in the context of emergency management. GIS were designed to support geographical inquiry and, ultimately, spatial decision making. The value of GIS in emergency management arises directly from the benefits of integrating a technology designed to support spatial decision making into a field with a strong need to address numerous critical spatial decisions. For this reason, new applications of GIS in emergency management have flourished in recent years along with an interest in furthering this trend. In addition to this growing interest, the adoption of GIS into the emergency management arena has been bolstered in some countries by favourable legislation regarding the use of spatial information in emergency (see, for example, Mondschein 1994). There is a variety of interesting perspectives on GIS in emergency management, and this is evidenced by recent speculations on this topic (Bruzewicz 1994; Johnson 1992; Mondschein 1994; Newsom and Mitani 1993) and closely related topics like GIS in natural hazards (Coppock 1995; Dangermond 1991; Wadge et al 1993), risk (Rejeski 1993), and environmental hazards (Emani 1996; Gatrell and Vincent 1991; Vaughn 1996). Although this attention indicates that the use of GIS in emergency planning is increasing, it is still a relatively young academic research area with few refereed journal articles. For