Effective Incident Response with Custom GIS Tools

In Brief

When a major oil spill occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, the client needed to know where and how the oil was spreading, how it was impacting the environment, and which resources were available to respond. Resource Data led the GIS response team and built custom web and mobile apps that provided spatial information crucial to guiding clean-up efforts and evaluating the effects to the Gulf’s natural resources. Beyond the immediate crisis, we continued to offer long-term data management support, ensuring comprehensive response and remediation efforts and strategic planning.

Challenge

Facing an oil spill, our client needed to rapidly assess and respond to the environmental impact and the spread of the spill. The critical requirements included:

Immediate visualizations of the current spill status for effective cleanup targeting
Predictive analytics to pre-deploy resources in anticipation of the spill’s movement

Solution

Resource Data addressed the client’s spatial data needs comprehensively, giving them views of current conditions as well as future projections, in the following ways

Data Management: Acquired, prepared, and integrated incident and response data from diverse sources.
Standardized Workflows: Developed workflows ensuring the integrity and chain of custody of response data.
Data Quality: Managed terabytes of spatial and non-spatial data, maintaining its quality and completeness.
Interactive Viewer: Built a real-time, tactical viewer for response efforts accessible to dispersed users.
Mobile Applications: Created apps for field data collection, such as boom deployments and wildlife observations, and providing immediate data access to the Response Team.
GIS Coordination: Handled GIS requests with deadlines measured in hours.
Map Production: Delivered scheduled and ad hoc paper maps.
Legal and NRDA Support: Supplied spatial data for legal and National Resource Damage Assessment processes.

Our solutions unified the geographically dispersed Response Team, offering a consistent and up-to-date operational picture where they all used the same information at the same time. This enhanced situational awareness led to more informed decision-making.

Results

As the lead GIS vendor, Resource Data was integral to the Response Team, offering vital spatial information and 24/7 support during the critical post-spill period. The applications helped coordinate around-the-clock spill response work by BP, the U.S. Coast Guard, NOAA, the EPA, four state agencies, and multiple contractors successfully.

The field data became more accurate and was used daily to support the ongoing response and meet federal reporting requirements. More than 50,000 National Resource Advisor reports were filled out and gathered during the response effort. And over 1,000 people used our applications throughout the cleanup.

Our contributions extended beyond mapping, encompassing project management and long-term data management support, ensuring the client’s ongoing preparedness and effective response strategies.