Abstract

Federal, state and local governmental agencies have been investing considerably in emergency response management systems to assist crisis management officers in the assessment, mitigation and response to emergency situations. In crisis management contexts, the timeliness of a response may be determined with reference to a fixed instant in the form of an absolute action threshold. This establishes the last possible point in time where any sort of solution is available. Once an action threshold is passed, a crisis is no longer containable; whatever adverse consequences a problem portends are thereafter inescapable. In this paper, we describe a special GIS-based response management system, EVResponse that combines GIS capabilities with web based voice translation technologies such as VoiceXML to effectively coordinate the pre, current and post crisis management activities. VoiceXML provides open standards based methodology to facilitate the integration and communication of emergency response systems with existing disaster planning systems. The EVResponse application uses web services to provide real-time reporting capabilities to both decision makers and first response units.

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