Calif. city gets wireless jump on earthquake damage

By Trudy Walsh

Connecting state and local government leaders

| December 13, 2002

Scott Fabbro, project coordinator for the land information system of Glendale, Calif., learned from the experiences of his father, a Federal Emergency Management Agency inspector, how vital geographic data can be in an emergency. <br>

Scott Fabbro, project coordinator for the land information system of Glendale, Calif., learned from the experiences of his father, a Federal Emergency Management Agency inspector, how vital geographic data can be in an emergency.

'My dad never touched a computer,' Fabbro said. 'I'd go into his office in Pasadena, and he would have stacks and stacks of binders.' Each binder represented a structure he was responsible for inspecting and marking with pins on a map. The elder Fabbro inspected property damage after the powerful Northridge earthquake that hit California in 1994.

Now Glendale's property inspectors report damage wirelessly from the field with Fujitsu notebook PCs, Compaq iPaq handhelds and other wireless devices. They use Accela ERS emergency response software from Accela Inc. of San Francisco, which combines a geographic information system with FEMA's ATC-20 building safety evaluation form.

Inspectors mark on a digital map the location of damage and its severity. Other city employees can then pull up the map online.

Before the city began using the wireless system in 1999, the damage reporting process was cumbersome, Fabbro said. An inspector would call in an incident, and Fabbro would create a damage report. The inspector would then return to the office with a stack of ATC-20 forms to map.

Glendale, located about 10 miles from the epicenter of the 1994 earthquake, suffered significant damage including collapsed parking structures. Fabbro said that if the city had had the ERS system then, officials could have given 'a profound level of service to the people affected.' As it was, they took weeks to find the heaviest pockets of damage, Fabbro said. With the GIS system, 'We could have seen the damage like a rash,' he said.

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