Virtual Earth & JEPRS for Disaster Recovery

<p>In natural disasters, often the recovery process is most painful and most difficult, requiring significant local, state and federal resources.* Yet, the typical, legacy Emergency Management Systems often only focus on the initial emergency event, not the recovery process, leaving disparate, slow and unconnected systems to “pick up the pieces.” <p>To address this problem in the wake of the recent fires in Southern California, Microsoft partner <a href="http://www.infusion.com" target="_blank">Infusion Development</a> worked with the County of San Diego to identify its requirements for a Disaster Assessment and Collaboration Portal (DACP). The portal is a customized deployment of their <a href="http://www.jeprs.com" target="_blank">Joint Emergency Planning & Response System (JPRS)</a> that leverages the Microsoft <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth/government" target="_blank">Virtual Earth</a> mapping platform and Microsoft <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.mspx" target="_blank">Sharepoint</a> and allows users to visualize and collaborate around a crisis event (readers of this blog should already be familiar with JEPRS). <p>The DACP allows multiple users--property owners, County of San Diego personnel, FEMA personnel--to access publicly available information on property damage. Properties that have been assessed are represented by green, house-shaped icons on the Virtual Earth map giving users an immediate visual and understanding of up-to-date assessment efforts (the data is dynamically updated through Sharepoint). Clicking on a property icon and then clicking on the resulting bubble that appears on the icon, provides the user with a snapshot of the completed assessment form (FEMA standard). You can then click on the "View Assessment Form" button in this window to see a scanned TIFF version of the completed form. Alternately, users can use the search box to search for properties by address, damage assessment form number, parcel number, or lat/long coordinates. <p>Additional overlays on the map include icons for assistance centers and parcel boundaries. <p>For Country staff, there is a sign in that allows those users access to an online chat box and records monitoring, both JEPRS features. <p>Meanwhile, the portal was designed with the average user in mind and so is intuitive and easy to use, and includes a web part that the County can use to communicate announcements directly to citizens. <p>The site is obviously public-facing and you can check it out <a href="http://www.sdcountydisasterrecovery.org/DACP/default.aspx" target="_blank">here</a>. <p><a href="http://www.sdcountydisasterrecovery.org/DACP/default.aspx" target="_blank"><img style="border-top-width:0px;border-left-width:0px;border-bottom-width:0px;border-right-width:0px" height=405 alt=DACP src="http://tkfiles.storage.msn.com/y1pyJQc6Yo2cX6WEqKcFm3kkJnyl-Qe0V8OQWj6bPsfwgfKB7cHosC2M5uCx8zLLXimnirknecoQRQ? PARTNER=WRITER" width=640 border=0></a><img src="http://c.services.spaces.live.com/CollectionWebService/c.gif?cid=3934802439182364865&page=RSS%3a+Virtual+Earth+%26+JEPRS+for+Disaster+R ecovery&referrer=" width="1px" height="1px" border="0" alt=""><img style="position:absolute" alt="" width="0px" height="0px" src="http://c.live.com/c.gif?NC=31263&NA=1149&PI=73329&RF=&DI=3919&PS=85545&TP=virtualearth4gov.spaces.live.com&GT1=virtualearth4gov">

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