| E-MAPS was originally developed during the DC-Sniper spree as a GIS tool to aid
Police with rapid deployment of roadblock locations. The software allowed the user to
quickly identify an incident and develop an optimized and prioritized road closure plan to
effectively "Seal Off" an area. The software was made freely available to all
jurisdictions involved, including Maryland State Police, DC Metro Police, Virginia State
Police and all the surrounding counties. Upon capture of the suspects, several of
the agencies which had used the software suggested its commercialization as an emergency
decision support and planning tool. E-MAPS is the result of over 3 years of additional
development work and is designed to provide emergency planning and crisis management tools
for use during an emergency situation. The software allows a user with limited
experience to quickly navigate to the location of the incident, assess damage by
identifying impacted facilities, develop a containment plan, efficiently evacuate the
surrounding area and finally begin to recover by identifying the necessary emergency
support resources.
E-MAPS can be installed on a field
computer without the need for Internet access. The software can be easily
implemented in Emergency Operation Centers or Mobile units.
The software is self contained and does not require any additional mapping software
or data.
Users with existing ESRI based GIS data can
substitute in house data in the software. E-MAPS is designed to run in field conditions on
minimally configured laptop or desktop systems running any version of Microsoft Windows
Operating System
E-MAPS provides the user with following
capabilities:
- Provides tools which allow planning of
emergency scenarios, responses and resources.
- Allows users to organize planned
emergency scenarios and responses in encrypted archive format, ready for recall during an
emergency.
- Provides tools for upload of emergency
information to Web, PDA and Cellular devices.
- Allows the user to manually zoom in or enter
an address/road intersection, place name or coordinates and have the software quickly map
the area with a scale dependent display.
- Provides the user with a report on the
location of major facilities such as schools, hospitals,shopping centers, parks and
government buildings.
- Graphically share information with
users in other State or Local agencies in a collaboration mode.
- Compute the minimum number of road closures
required to “seal off" the area.
- Rank road closures in order of
importance, so as respondents arrive, most critical closures can be addressed first.
- Automatically adjusts existing
evacuation routes to detour around incident locations.
- Provides detour turn locations for
evacuation routes.
- Provides population impact report,
including total population, under 18, Senior Citizens, housing units, group homes,
retirement homes, college dorms, etc.
- Plume modeling using EPA’s ALOHA
model. Automatically, Post Maps and Reports on to
Internal web sites or on the world wide web.
- Law enforcement investigative tools,
including proximity and timeline analysis.
- Includes 5 Search Patterns for support
of Search and Rescue operations.
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