Wildfire season is upon California again. Last year, several Bay Area communities were affected by wildfires on the largest scale in their history.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE ), the Federal Emergency Management Agency and individual local agencies worked together to aid in relief efforts. Several of those efforts were backed by geographic information systems and technology.
The debris relief effort in Northern California cost between $1.2 billion and $1.3 billion for federally- and state-led work.
"Of this, approximately, $950 million in mission assignments to USACE was obligated and approximately $80 million in mission assignments to U.S. EPA was obligated for debris removal efforts," Kimberly Burgess, external affairs officer for the USACE, told Techwire in an email.
The USACE works under the direction of FEMA, "based on mission assignments from them in accordance with the National Response Framework."
Because of that, funding could have gone up or down from original estimates, based on emergent need.
"On the Arcadis side, we used the following Software: ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Online for the GIS work; Fulcrum for field data collection; Mobile Epiphany-Krinkle application for data collection related to debris hauling. The hardware we used included a mix of mobile tablets and phones and laptops," GIS analyst Ryan Miller told Techwire in an email. Miller is with engineering and design company Arcadis U.S. and worked with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on this mission.
On the USACE side, ArcGIS and Access Database gathered and stored information, according to Marzena Ellis, an engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New York District. Google Earth and Google Maps were also used. Google Earth displayed ArcGIS features while Maps directed crews to debris locations.
Other recovery efforts included Sonoma County's Sonoma Recovers website, which includes maps to answer residents' questions about the efforts, and an app to help residents find long-term shelter during the evacuations and while homes were being rebuilt.
San Francisco’s Chief Digital Services Officer, Carrie Bishop, "built a hasty team of developers on that October afternoon, built an application that aggregated all available long-term housing (Zillow, Hotpads, etc.) and longer-term camping situations (Hipcamp), immediately got the app out for victims of the fires to search for long-term housing in the Northern California counties that were affected by fires. This saved the shelter from trying to field the hundreds of calls that were coming into the center for housing from the victims," San Francisco Chief of Staff Nina D'Amato told Techwire in an email.
Santa Rosa also used GIS in evacuation efforts.
