GIS combines with emergency 911 services
More than 45 states have now passed legilation to fund and provide Enhanced 911 service (E-911) to their citizens. However, only 30 percent of counties nationwide are in compliance with the new regulations, and an additional 20 percent are taking steps toward E-911 implementation.
E-911 service enables emergency dispatchers to instantly correspond incoming 911 phone calls with a location. Pinpointing distress calls helps dispatchers better allocate scarce emergency services, which minimizes rescue time and saving taxpayers the cost of expensive cross-county excursions.
Each county must have a georeferenced address for every residential and business parcel under its jurisdication to achieve E-911 service. In the cities, where a number of addresses are post office boxes — and the less-populated countryside where rural carrier routes often suffice — addresses must be either located or newly generated. Because of this, some counties must completely readdress their parcel base to provide E-911 service.
The need to georeference numerous parcels for correlation with addresses and phone numbers has increased county government interest in both GIS and a quick, accurate means of building a GIS database. Now, computer mapping techniques can collect and organize data cheaper, faster and more accurately than ever before.
Montgomery County, Ind., with a population base of about 40,000 and a land area of 440 square miles, found it had a substantial number of unaddressed parcels and made a decision to generate a completely new and consistent address guide to achieve E-911 service. The terrain of the county has several GIS-favorable advantages — it is flat, wide open and laid out in a regular grid of sections bounded by county roads.
A crew from GeoResearch in Billings, Mont., was able to georeference about 900 parcels a day in urban areas and about 100 in rural areas, due to the greater distance between structures. “There really isn’t a faster way of collecting the data,” says technical support manager for the mapping system developer, James McInerney. “It takes about half the time of traditional field mapping and hand digitizing. And while you’re in the field, you can geocode additional information that you may need later.”
Other counties also have used the E-911 mapping process as a foundation for a complete countywide GIS land base. Big Horn County, Mont., started with E-911 mapping and has since added detailed road attribution, hydrography, irrigation, railroad lines and crossings, tax boundaries and much more. And Lawrence County, Mont., now includes lot and block numbers, county and corporate boundaries and other information tagged to location for easy access.
