GIS Solutions Enhancing Emergency Response, Management, and Response Team Assessments

Incidents involving dangerous goods, including flammable gases and liquids, can happen at any time and in any place. When they do, Emergency Response Assistance Canada's 320+ members count on us to provide a safe and effective emergency response 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Various GIS solutions exist within Emergency Response Assistance Canada (ERAC) to support these functions. Examples include our resource locator tool that spatially queries and returns key information from 40+ layers of emergency resources to aid in decision making, and our incident recording and reporting process that works in tandem with STARS and leverages Survey123, Dashboards, and Make for automation. These solutions are critical for timely and effective incident response and reporting.

Another significant function that ERAC provides is emergency response team training events, assessments, and approvals. In the past, this was an administration-intensive and multi-departmental process. Numerous paper forms would be gathered, reviewed, approved, and post-event tasks such as filing and certificate creation were required. These events have been modernized in our GIS department. All forms are now digital and post-event tasks have been automated, significantly increasing efficiency and removing the heavy administrative burden of these events.

This presentation will outline ERAC's GIS solutions along with providing a more detailed look at the training, assessment, and approval platform. Highlights and demonstrations will showcase how it was designed to be an intuitive, user-friendly, and efficient solution for data collection, review, and visualization, and how automated processes were built to optimize workflows.