Nonie Castro
Dear GIS Professionals,
I have been in discussion with others around the State of
Florida, including Richard Butgereit with the Florida Division of Emergency
Management, about starting up an Emergency GIS Response team to help local
governments during special events and disasters. Picking up on efforts
like GISCorps (http://www.giscorps.org)
and Texas EGRT (http://www.texasegrt.org),
we all agree that we need something within the State, primarily focused on
local-to-local government support, which can be deployed fast on-site anywhere
within the State. State-to-state support is available through EMAC (http://www.emacweb.org) by coordination with state emergency management, and these
missions may be extended to local government as well, but it too can take
time.
It is our thought that this group of GIS volunteers would be
trained in ICS/NIMS as a base and have various levels of GIS skills. This
volunteer group would be “on-call” for a lack of better words should there be a
need for their assistance. Obviously, details still need to be worked out
on how requests would exactly work but we want to start building a group to
discuss it.
If this interests you and you’d think you’d like to hear more then please sign-up here http://goo.gl/forms/Tk7WBuodYs and we will be in contact with you as we continue our discussions.
Please feel free to share this email with your local GIS user groups. We are wanting to reach out to those of you in Southern Georgia and Southern Alabama as well to bring you into the discussion so please feel free to sign up if you are in this area as well.
Thank you,
Scott Warner, GISP, FPEM
Public Safety GIS/ 9-1-1 Specialist/WebEOC Administrator/
Special Needs Registry Technical Specialist
Bay County, Florida Emergency Services
700 Highway 2300
Panama City, FL 32409-5090
Main: (850) 248-6040
Direct: (850) 248-6041
Fax: (850) 248-6059
LAT: 30.2990648 LONG:
-85.6622406
USNG: 16RFU2864152683
President- Florida Chapter of URISA