Homeland Security - MEDS Protect

Applications in GIS - Mod 7

Critical infrastructure includes not only those infrastructures vital to our defense and security, but also those people, places and things necessary to allow for everyday living and working.  Certain key resources, such as large gathering place, may be deemed to be critical at certain times when circumstances can cause them to become a target.  One such example of this is the Boston Marathon Bombing of 2013.  

Our lesson this week took us back to that incident as though we were preparing for it.  We started with the MEDS data we had put together for last weeks assignment.  The Boston Marathon was determined to be at risk, so security needed to be stepped up.  We were tasked with identifying critical infrastructures in the vicinity of the marathon finish line location and implement protective measures such as securing the perimeter of a protective buffer zone around targeted sites by locating surveillance posts at ingress and egress points and siting the most optimal observations positions in and around the event site.

We started with our Buffer tool to create a 3 mile buffer around the finish line.  Our next step was to locate those key resources within this buffer zone that could potentially be secondary targets.  For this we used our GNIS (Geographic Names Information System) layer to run a select by location query to isolate those features that fell within our zone of interest.  For this lesson we focused our attention on hospitals, selecting out those that were nearest to the finish line using the Generate Near Table tool, then of those, manually selecting those that met our criteria.  We then created a 500' buffer around those hospitals and the finish line to emphasize those areas that required stepped up security.  Extra security precautions were required at the finish line so we used the Intersect tool to determine appropriate locations for security checkpoints along the ingress and egress routes at the border of our finish line buffer zone.

Safety and security at large events like the Boston Marathon is dependent upon surveillance.  Since the finish line for this event was considered to be a high target area security needed to be heightened with the use of surveillance equipment, providing line of sight coverage of the finish line for the entire block.  15 sights were chosen to provide the greatest amount of coverage without obstruction. The height of the equipment ranges from 10 to 15 meters in elevation.  Determining the placement of these cameras started with converting LiDAR data to a raster then generating a hillshade effect to see how the shadows would fall at the time and date of the event.  Next we created a new feature class of surveillance points strategically placed along the around the finish line to provide the most unobstructed view possible.  To verify the placement of these points we ran the Viewshed tool to show us an obstructed areas between the surveillance point and the finish line.  With this information we were able to determine which points need adjustment either through relocation or increased height.

With that all set we then used the Create Line of Sight tool which allowed us to run a line from our surveillance points to the finish line, including the elevation of the point, which enabled it to determine where there might be sections of obstructed view.  We created a graph of one of the lines that had an obstructed view and the graph shows how that line of sight is obstructed.

It would have been nice to see how all this showed up in a 3D view, but I was never able to get the line of sight lines copied over to ArcScene to see it.