SPURS-EM

Spurs-Em was formerly a website belonging to the Strategic and Practical Use of Remotely Sensed Data in Emergency Management - a snappily named partnership between NASA, the EMD, the University of Washington (UW) and the Western Disaster Center (WDC). It is now an expired domain. For reference, what follows is the original SPURS-EM Proposal.

At 12:30 P.M. on February 28, 2001, amidst the initial statewide response to an earthquake, Governor Gary Locke signed a Proclamation of Emergency based, among other indicators, on rudimentary Geographical Information System (GIS) data. This was the first significant operational use of technical data to support executive decision-making in Washington State Emergency Management (EMD). Now, the EMD proposes to take the next major step in the use of technical data by using remote sensing, as an essential tool in the executive decision making process for all phases of emergency management.

Washington State is one of the states most prone to natural and man-made disasters. In the last 40 years, the state has had 42 Federal Disaster declarations and many more state and locally proclaimed emergencies. We have included a very short video (See Appendix A) that will give you a flavor of the hazards we face, our mission, our team, and our facilities.

The Mission of Washington State EMD is the protection of life, property, the economy, and the environment. The SPURS-EM application is a directed program to integrate products from satellite remote sensing into the operational structure of the EMD. This goal places remote sensing data in a central role for the complex tasks of hazard preparedness, response, recovery, and more importantly, mitigation. As a result of the use of remotely sensed data, decision makers will have better information regarding the application of resources to emergency management issues.

The SPURS-EM partnership between the EMD, the University of Washington (UW) and the Western Disaster Center (WDC), will provide the skills and resources necessary to realize the integration of this type of application. The WDC will provide outreach opportunities to promote the usage of this application and EMD will promote the use of SPURS-EM with Washington State Emergency Management Association (WSEMA), which represents emergency managers from Washington county and municipal jurisdictions.

In this grant request we detail our mission, the four phases of Emergency Management, and how the SPURS-EM grant would assist us in making Washington State a more disaster resistant state, with a lesser reliance on a roulette strategy. We will be directly utilizing remote sensing in a real world application that would benefit our entire state and be exported to other jurisdictions and states. We plan to put the remote sensing capabilities that would be developed through this grant, to immediate use with widespread positive impact.

The SPURS-EM application will focus on developmental and operational integration for the continuous use of an adaptive classified land cover product and the monthly generation of hazard specific forecasts. SPURS-EM will provide additional, more current remotely sensed information to support the hazards analyses and predictive functions of the EMD. This information will supplement local jurisdictions’ priorities and other available information such as risk maps and historical data. A major portion of the effort will be to define and evaluate the contributions remote sensing technology can make to strategic hazard mitigation and integrated assessment.

SPURS-EM will take satellite images combined with other static data layers in a GIS to test disaster probability scenarios for decision-making purposes as depicted below.