Patrick Prepares With GIS
AIR BASE MANAGES BOTH GEOSPATIAL DATA AND A WIDE RANGE OF BUILDING/MAINTENANCE INFORMATION.
As they prepared for the 2006 and future hurricane seasons, officials at Patrick Air Force Base on Florida’s Atlantic coast have turned to a crisis management software system that uses CAD and GIS programs that can help them better predict where problems are likely to arise and the resulting damage inflicted.
This summer, the 45th Space Wing, which is headquartered at Patrick AFB and includes personnel and assets at the nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station as well as down-range stations on Antigua and Ascension Island, ran through a hurricane exercise using crisis management software and a newly added damage assessment tool developed along with Autodesk.
The software provided quick information aimed at enabling the facility to meet a 48-hour damage assessment requirement set by federal authorities. The software also helped the responders identify where vital areas were in the exercise, such as buildings/ areas where people would likely be located.
“The tool, which we recently launched, is the Facilities Infrastructure Assessment Tool,” explained Michael Gilley, GeoBase manager for the 45th Space Wing. “That is for disasters, but mainly here for hurricanes. We took everything from the Disaster Control Group and Web-enabled them, streamlining the process. It can spit out damage and cost estimates, because we’re required to have a cost assessment of a hurricane back to Space Command within 48 hours.
“It’s hard to go assess up to 1,000 buildings within 48 hours,” Gilley added. “So we took everything they were doing on paper and Web-enabled it.”
The assessment system was the third integrated CAD/GIS system implemented by the 45th Space Wing, with the goal of enabling planners to manage both geospatial data and a wide range of building/maintenance information.
“We had all this data, but we didn’t have any way for everyone to see it in a decisionmaking manner. We also had stovepipes and different data sets. We needed a way to integrate our drawings and GIS data sets, and clear up those stovepipes from different contractors,” Gilley explained.
The first step of the process, which began in 2003, was to adopt a data-management solution. For that, officials selected Oracle Spatial Environment to manage the Wing’s geospatial data. That provided an open architecture that could serve as the basis for using applications from Autodesk and other companies.
The second step, Gilley continued, was to adopt applications to show the data. “First of all, we needed a daily application— a facilities management and situational awareness application so we can do daily business at the Wing. For that, we chose the [Autodesk] Base Visualization Tool, which takes all the drawings and other information and integrates and displays that.
“Some of the drawings we have go back to the 1930s, so those had to be scanned in. Then we also had drawings in the CAD format. We’ve got about 50,000 drawings, of which about 20,000 are scanned. We also have nearly 7,000 CAD drawings. We’re showing all of those through one interface, which is available 24/7. If a water pipe breaks tonight, they have the drawings at their fingertips as long as they have the communications,” Gilley said.
The second application is Crisis Command, a command and control tool for use by security forces. It integrates geospatial and mapping imagery, weather and other current data, and standard information from reference sources covering such topics as chemical spills and explosions to create a real-time picture of an incident and the response to it.
“It’s about bringing all this data together so we can make decisions,” Gilley said. “It’s a way to integrate all the parts of the base so that commanders have a clear view of what’s going on.”
One major benefit of the software, Gilley noted, was that it made access to maps far easier for base personnel, eliminating 75 percent of requests to the GIS office for maps and cutting the time for fulfilling a map request from 24 to 48 hours to about an hour. ♦
