Overview of some of the flooded areas
The Emergency response, codenamed Operation Outlook, involved multiple agencies such as the Military, Coast Guard, Severn Trent Water and The Environment Agency.
“There was a large demand for both digital mapping and paper maps” said Nick Boon, GIS manager at Gloucester Constabulary.
Mr Boon added “This data ranged from excel spreadsheets containing bowser locations, RAF Ariel images and Environmental Agency flood extents. Maps were produced for the military ands Severn Trent for locating water bowsers around the country.
Water Bowser
One of the first IT systems used in Silver Command was Atlas OPS. Atlas OPS is a real time operational emergency management system, which enables the constabulary to manage resources and incidents via a GIS interface used by multiple operators force wide.
Mr Boon said Atlas OPS was predominantly used for the locations of the hundreds of water bowsers deployed around the county, but was also used to display road closures, “This enables operators in silver Control to quickly and easily see where the resources (water bowsers) were and to view road closure information,” he said
Prior to Operation Outlook Atlas OPS has also been used in Gloucestershire for contingency planning and during operations and events such as the Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) and Cheltenham Races.
Mr Boon said Atlas OPS has two main uses over other traditional GIS applications, “It gave us the ability to build complex contingency plans, using the mapping interface as a base, intelligent information can be complied into a plan, including operational orders, photographs, CAD drawings of buildings and event layouts, locations of interest with links to relevant information and location gazetteers (OS Address Point and custom locations).
“The plans can be exported as a ‘view only’ Atlas show file which can be viewed without the need for full Atlas OPS, with future developments planned to offer different access rights for different levels of security”.
Atlas OPS also includes RTO (Real Time Operations), which turns Atlas OPS into a full operation/event management tool.
RTO server is the hub of the system whereby Atlas OPS clients connect in to it”, Said Mr Boon, “They can then perform operations such as deploying of resources (Police Officers, Vehicles, etc) onto a map, which automatically updates the log with the movements information. Each resource can also have user defined attributes associated to them, and full contingency plans can be viewed simultaneously as the template for an operation/event. At the end of the event a full audit log is available of key events, and all decisions / actions taken.