Author(s)

A. Andreadis, P. Menicori & A. Pietrelli

Abstract

Organization and coordination of rescue teams acting in the field are crucial issues for public bodies and institutions which have to guarantee help and support both in times of peace and in phases of crisis. A perfect synergy of the rescue parties permits one to intervene in an efficient and precise way during calamitous events, effectively directing the operations of the emergency, reducing the times of intervention and optimizing the human resources. The system proposed in this paper has been developed for the \“Operational Room” of the Civil Defence of the Siena Province (Italy), working primarily in emergency situations. It allows the visualization and the real-time tracking of the rescue parties acting in the field, through an \“Intelligent Board” installed in the Operational Room. The localization is visualized on Geographic Information System (GIS) maps and it can be implemented both through dedicated software, allowing high analysis capabilities, and through web browsers, enabling remote visualizations. The rescue teams are equipped with palmtop devices with networking capabilities, in order to communicate with the Operational Room and to point out in real time the occurrence of certain calamitous events (i.e. interrupted road, landslide, accident, etc.), thus allowing the coordination and distribution of these data to all the other rescue parties. Keywords: crisis management, natural disasters and emergencies, GIS, Civil Defence, tracking data, GPS.

Keywords

crisis management, natural disasters and emergencies, GIS, Civil Defence, tracking data, GPS.