Quick Reference
Items below are intended to serve as a quick reference starting point for finding GIS resources which may be of value during a local or statewide disaster response in Minnesota. Training opportunities and operational insights have also been provided.
If any information provided here is in conflict with information provided by Minnesota Homeland Security and Emergency Management (HSEM), information as provided by HSEM will be considered more current and correct.
Last webpage review: September 19, 2023
Criminal Justice Information Services
The Criminal Justice Information Services Workgroup of the Minnesota Geospatial Advisory Council has developed a best practices guide for connecting law enforcement and other CJIS-regulated data to GIS systems for purposes of analysis and information sharing. Use the links below to review and download the guide, as well as access some related information which may be of value to individuals interested in this topic.
Damage Assessment
When FEMA's Damage Assessment Operations Manual was reissued in April of 2016, U.S. National Grid was prominently included as the preferred location reporting standard. Use of the U.S. National Grid federal coordinate standard was also incorporated into the 2021 multi-agency effort to create a comprehensive Damage Assessment Standard for the state of Minnesota. The links in this section provide expanded detail.
Data
Data sets provided by national entities should be quality checked before use because they are often collected and bundled by federal contractors using commercial sources of questionable quality. Whenever possible, local and state resources, if available, provide substantially better quality.
Contacts
Dynamic (real time/same day)
Imagery
Imagery has two fundamental uses in a disaster.
- To gain understanding of "what's happening now". This type of imagery can be collected without high precision such as from a drone or Civil Air Patrol aircraft. Collection should be ongoing during the disaster and made as widely available to the entire response effort as possible.
- To serve as the "official disaster snap-shots" for damage assessment. This type of imagery should be collected by a professional commercial imagery company, or obtained through state/federal disaster response resources. Weather permitting, best practice is to attempt collection at key times during the disaster - peak flood level, as an example. There is typically no need to make this type of imagery available below the decision maker level.
If at all possible, part of pre-disaster planning should be to determine how any imagery collected during the incident will be distributed and archived. File size and proprietary file formats can sometimes make access, distribution and storage problematic.
Base (dated)
Dynamic (real time/same day/as available)
Lessons Learned
Dated, but worthwhile reads.
Maps
In the age of electrons, many in the GIS community have a lost sight of importance of the paper map. However, disasters aren't kind to power grids, batteries go dead in the field, and for a responder, nothing beats being able to lay out a "situational display" on the hood of a truck for a speedy briefing. These realities mean paper maps in the Emergency Services Sector aren't going away any time soon.
On the USNG page this site, find information about the FEMA's coordinate standard - U.S. National Grid. U.S. National Grid formatted maps for the entire state of Minnesota may be downloaded there.
Immediately below find links to some known traditional paper map sources.
Request For Assistance (Action Request Form)
In the same way one Emergency Management organization can submit an Action Request Form (ARF) to another - "We need assistance clearing highway 11 from X to Z" - a request for geospatial assistance can also be submitted. And in the same way that the requesting organization would need to pay for assistance clearing a road, they would also need to pay costs associated with requesting geospatial assistance. This has been a seldom used function in Minnesota, but find below information about this topic.
Product Requests*
NIMS Resource Typing - Personnel Requests*
* Per explanation of the Geospatial Community Resilience Volunteer Program described on the home page of this website, the EPC maintains a list of GIS professionals who have volunteered to provide no-cost, short-term, peer-to-peer support during a disaster. Many of these individuals are highly qualified in GIS and have extensive previous experience in Emergency Management organizations.
Training
Links to Incident Command Structure (ICS) online training materials (IS-700.B and IS-100) have been provided here to help anyone operating in an official capacity understand Emergency Management basics and incident chain-of-command. FEMA - EMI training materials which have a geospatial slant have also been noted.
The 2011 Twin Cities Geospatially Enabling Community Collaboration (GECCo) was the largest event of its type ever conducted by the Geospatial Information Technology Association (GITA). Funded by the Department of Homeland Security, GITA, and several local organizations, it brought together the geospatial, utility and Emergency Services Sector communities to explore ways to improve operational coordination and resiliency. Although several links on the GECCO landing page are now broken, the site still has a wealth of related available training material applicable to the Twin Cities metro.
- IS-700.B: An Introduction to the National Incident Management System
- IS-100.C: Introduction to the Incident Command System, ICS 100
- IS-103: Geospatial Information Systems Specialist (GISS)
- IS-60.B: The Homeland Security Geospatial Concept-of-Operations (GeoCONOPS) for Planners and Decision Makers
- IS-61.B: The Homeland Security Geospatial Concept-of-Operations (GeoCONOPS) In Depth
- IS-922.A: Applications of GIS for Emergency Management
- ICS Resource Center
YouTube
Informational presentations offered during the committee's quarterly meetings are available on the MGAC EPC YouTube channel. Click here to view.