You Can't Get There From Here

GIS Programming - Participation Assignment #2

You can’t get there from here.  It’s a comment frequently heard.  Often it’s said with a grin or a smirk, sometimes with chagrin.  But when it’s a matter of life or death or the loss of all you own, it’s not so funny.  Narrow streets and curvy road can be a serious impediment for large emergency vehicles like fire engines.  Even wider streets with cars parked on both sides can be difficult to navigate.  These are issue that concern fire departments around the world.  How you get there from here could save a life, or lose it. 

This article I found on sciencedirect.com, published by Procedia Social and Behavior Science from the 11^th International Conference of the International Institute for Infrastructure Resilience and Reconstruction (I3R2) : Complex Disasters and Disaster Risk Management, titled “Models and Applications of Firefighting Vulnerability”  talks about the many investigations that have been done by researchers in regards to the use of GIS in firefighting, but weren’t comprehensive enough so another study was called for.

This study focused on the scope of firefighting models in regards to applications in the system and showing how much more GIS can be used with new information technology environments with the use of state-of-the-art devices and more in-depth information from the fire scenes.  The four models were based on fire vulnerability types, considering firefighting vulnerabilities and critical factors through the different stages of the fire, from the notification at the fire station to the fire scene, through the firefight and back to the station.  The study was conducted in four cities in South Korea.

This is the link for the article if you’d like to read it in detail:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042816300192