As the frequency of natural and human-caused disasters increases, there is a greater need for efficient coordination amongst emergency responders, resource managers, and the public. GIS is often touted as an invaluable and underutilized tool for public safety teams. But what does mapping in near real-time entail, and is this feasible for a small municipality? This presentation will explore how the Town of Concord, MA recently embarked on answering this question using ArcGIS Online’s suite of tools.
In March 2024, the Town’s GIS team was asked to facilitate a tabletop exercise, in coordination with several other Town departments, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA), and students from Massachusetts Maritime Academy’s Emergency Management program. We created a web application to edit and visualize near real-time updates of an excessive rainfall/flooding event in a simulated Emergency Operations Center (EOC).
In this presentation, we will demonstrate our final application and operations workflow, which took inspiration from the Emergency Management Operations ArcGIS Solution. We will also share our thought process for selection of appropriate tools, how we customized a solution within a limited scope and timeframe, and how we integrated data collection, maps, dashboards, and live data feeds, using Experience Builder. Finally, we will share our ideas for ways to expand and improve upon this application in the future.
