Pacific NW Explores virtual USA for Situational Awareness and Continuity of Operations
- John Cornelison
- February 10, 2011
Table of Contents
The Pacific Northwest is exploring solutions that can provide officials an overview of a regional event.
The existing situation is very fragmented:
- WA State is currently using ESI’s WebEOC (for which Vashon has an account) & ESiWebFUSION but this has an older architecture & cumbersome user interface and doesn’t readily allow integration with other technologies in use elsewhere.
- The state has a wrapper or GIS based viewer for WebEOC, known as the Washington Information Sharing Environment (WISE) that also aggregates additional data (including from the military, as it was developed by the National Guard)
- I’m not aware of what FEMA or DHS uses, but I suspect it is something else.
- Neighboring states use WebEOC and other custom solutions. (Oregon is adopting – with some trouble- a more regional system: Virtual Emergency Network of Multnomah, for instance.)
- King County has an independent solution, their SharePoint site (for which we also have an account).
- Seattle uses their own WebEOC instance.
- Vashon and other regional partners can’t afford the equipment, infrastructure, training that all these typically require, – or we’re locked out due to not meeting their security concerns - so have our own simplified solution consisting primarily of an incident log, a wiki that serves as a knowledgebase that all can contribute to, and an integrated document repository for documents that require a specialized editor or have a life outside the web site.
The new solution seems to be using the federal preferred solution known as virtual USA, aka vUSA, but apparently strives to integrate data from Washington via their WISE application - that is built using the trac software project management system and Adobe tools - including Flex that can encumber client installations and face a rocky future with the advent of HTML 5.
Ideally this vUSA solution may allow more readily capturing data from the clunky WebEOC interface and express it in a more flexible form. Whether localities such as Vashon will ever have rights to access this data is unknown, but I suspect it won’t be easy!
More on this new demo/initiative is hard to come by, but the PNW Pilot web site ahs some details:
“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Pacific Northwest (PNW) Virtual USA (vUSA) pilot was launched in September 2009 in partnership with Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Washington and Montana. The goal of the PNW pilot is to enable the states, as well as the region, to demonstrate a capability by the end of 2010 that significantly improves state and regional information sharing and collaboration, and thus aids decision-making during day-to-day and emergency operations across jurisdictions and disciplines.”
A search turned up this nice story on the initiative.
In another initiative, FEMA is also working on a new alerting protocol IPAWS-OPEN for alerting the public, thus serving a different niche.
What we will end up using for situational awareness on Vashon is up for grabs, but for now having our own solution (i.e., www.VashonEOC.org) allows us to customize functionality based on our needs (e.g., the incident log, wiki and document repository), serve up data to SharePoint or WebEOC or something else in the future, and to consume data from these or other varied inputs such as NOAA, Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, our volunteers on the streets of Vashon.
