Conundrum

Public safety emergencies. Is fast access to maps and records a critical issue?

It's 3 o'clock Sunday morning. An oil truck has tipped over, spilling thousands of gallons of hazardous material on a residential street. Or a major fire has broken out at a sprawling old factory complex. Or an aging water main has ruptured.

In an instant, municipal departments and agencies, such as the police and fire departments and local gas company, spring into action. This quickly mobilized emergency team then proceeds methodically to secure the area and correct the problem. Citizens applaud their efforts and take it for granted that the emergency team is working as efficiently and quickly as possible regardless of whether it takes minutes or weeks to resolve the problem.

It's always worth looking into whether an emergency response program could be improved, however, especially with respect to the potential for diagnosing problems and taking action more quickly.

Conventional Solution

In most municipalities, the point person for emergency response efforts is the first police officer on the scene. That officer typically sets all other responses in motion in accord with well-established local emergency response policies.

The police officer's first responsibility is to make immediate judgments to protect the public. He/she may have to decide to pull a driver from a burning vehicle, for example, knowing that the person could be injured more severely in the process.

On arrival, the Fire Department takes over the coordination of the emergency response, especially from the point of view of containing and remediating the cause. The Fire Department may call for assistance from the local Highway Department, the Water and Sewer Department, the local utility companies, and local, state and federal environmental protection authorities.

The appropriate experts then formulate a remediation strategy. This part of an emergency response effort can get bogged down if information needed to make the right judgments is not available.

The biggest issue is often waiting for the appropriate municipal information, including maps, drawing, inventory data and blueprints, to arrive. This information can help pinpoint the location of underground pipes, tanks, wiring systems, and known stockpiles of hazardous materials in the area. If they are lost, misplaced, out-of-date or in bad shape, they become a problem that can stop the emergency response team in its tracks.

21st Century Solution

In sprawling Toronto, Canada, the fourth largest city in North America with a population of 2.7 million, technology in the form of an Internet-based document retrieval system is now an essential new member of the emergency response team

The Toronto Works and Emergency Services Department has literally hundreds of workers in the field to maintain its enormous network of roads, storm sewers and water systems. In addition, Toronto recently absorbed six adjacent municipalities and their employees. That has meant merging seven different filing systems.

In emergencies such as road collapses, floods and pipe breaks, access to the files was previously a time consuming and often frustrating process, requiring field workers to carry microfilm reading equipment and stacks of drawings with them.

Now, emergency crews can find out all they need to know instantly by logging into the central departmental files in the main office from heavy duty laptop computers in their trucks. The heart of the filing system is a completed set of scanned images of the maps and engineering drawings for every street in the city. Operators in the field can find exactly what they need in seconds using simple word searches.

Overseeing the creation and implementation of the system, based on software applications from Laserfiche, is John Whelan, supervisor of Toronto's Works and Emergency system staff.

"What I like best about the new technology is that crews can start fixing problems immediately, without waiting for somebody to go to a remote office and look for documentation," Whelan says. "Before Laserfiche cards went missing, often just as they are needed to repair a major disaster such as a flood."

To learn more about document managment and disaster recovery issues visit these links:

An EPA site of emergency response procedures http://www.epa.gov/ebtpages/cleanup.html

Immediate Actions to Safeguard a Building Against a Chemical or Biological Attack http://securebuildings.lbl.gov/PA_I_Response.html

Go to www.osha.gov to see the standards set up to handle hazardious waste clean up.

The City of Toronto utilizes electronic records managment in its Emergency Services Department. http://www.Laserfiche.com/newsroom/02-11-27toronto.html

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