Abstract :
The 6.6 earthquake that jolted Los Angeles on January 17 caused structural damage estimated at up to $20 billion. The Northridge quake killed 61 people, left thousands homeless, and disrupted the infrastructure supporting a metropolitan population of about 10 million. A state of emergency was declared and the California governor´s Office of Emergency Services (OES) moved in to coordinate disaster relief services and administer the disbursement of emergency funds allocated through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Nearly every problem presented by the Northridge quake and its aftermath involves geographic information-damage assessment, resource deployment, monitoring of hazardous materials, and prioritizing recovery efforts. The author considers how OES established a special branch of their geographic information systems division to build a database specific to the Northridge quake.<>
Keywords :
disasters; earthquakes; geographic information systems; seismology; town and country planning; Federal Emergency Management Agency; Los Angeles; Office of Emergency Services; damage assessment; database; disaster relief services; earthquake; emergency; emergency funds; geographic information systems; hazardous materials; metropolitan population; recovery; resource deployment; structural damage; Computational Intelligence Society; Databases; Earth; Earthquakes; Emergency services; Geographic Information Systems; Marketing and sales; Monitoring; Predictive models; Soil;
