NEWS 9/30/08:
XeDAR Helps Coordinate FEMA's Rapid Inventory of Values Threatened (RIVaT) Assessment for Hurricane Ike
DENVER, Sep 30, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- XeDAR Corporation (OTCBB: XDRC), provides homeland security and defense consulting and IT management-and-security services to the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense and others; national intelligence agencies; and the U.S. Military. It announced today that it is assisting with the Rapid Inventory of Values Threatened (RIVaT) assessment for the areas recently damaged by Hurricane Ike. Work was performed by XeDAR's Premier Data Services, Inc. subsidiary in Englewood, CO.
The urgency of this work was primary, and Premier's team of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysts coordinated with several federal agencies (FGDC Cadastral Subcommittee, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) - Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Wildland Fire Decision Support System (WFDSS): RAVAR) and with county-level authorities throughout the southeastern United States to address the aftermath of the storm.
What Premier brought to the effort was digital representations of the lands affected by the hurricane in Texas, Tennessee, and Kentucky -- Premier assembled county-level data, down to the level of individual parcels of land, into a digital map and standardized the data to integrate various differences between counties and states into one, seamless map. Premier synchronized data for more than 2.5 million parcels -- stretching over 9 counties in these three states -- and appended these to one another. They sent one, region-wide standardized dataset to the experts at FEMA, who then overlaid that data onto post-hurricane aerial imagery of the same lands to determine federal relief response and appropriate dollar amounts for the damaged and destroyed property. FEMA submitted financial relief estimates to Congress within days of the storm.
"We learned after Katrina that responding to disasters, whether natural or man made, is all about preparedness and speed," says Premier Data Services President Bob Johnson. "We recognized a big need for more of both, and our GIS capabilities provide that. We saw that county authorities do things differently, just as every state does, but our expertise in GIS enables clear communication between different datasets -- between different government agencies and across state lines. We can now coordinate huge disaster-response operations very quickly. Neither hurricanes nor terrorists care about state borders, and survivors don't care about politics ... now we have a superior system that capitalizes on the strengths of different agencies and provides accurate, reliable results in a fraction of the time."
Johnson anticipates that, after the successful coordination of efforts in response to Hurricane Ike, there will be more demand for this sort of collaboration between government agencies and more need for universal, useful parcel-level cadastral information. "Ike opened some eyes about our nation's security. One conclusion is that a reliable, confident homeland security depends on readiness, on an efficient government which is more efficient and knowledgeable in its communications and responses. Whether it's hurricanes, or people out to do us harm, the answer is the same: better communication and more dependable, secure, standardized, shared information are keys to security." Johnson suggests that a proactive next step in this process will be to assemble and standardize the parcel data prior to a natural disaster or attack. "Preparedness and speed," he reiterated.
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