Public Awareness, Response and Recovery Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Public Awareness, Response and Recovery - Essay Example Situational awareness is the knowledge and understanding of the situations happening around and how one can predict the changes that will happen with time according to the dynamics of the environment. The best plan of action for creating situational awareness is the use of Geographical Information System (GIS) Technology. It uses other technologies such as GPS as well as networking in order to provide information about the place and time of the happenings of the situation. It collects data from different sources to build up relevant information required to act on a situation as well as to predict a situation (ESRI white paper, 2008). The GIS aggregation of data also involves data that is useful to the emergency responders such as on the location of the essential resources, infrastructure and assets useful to respond to a situation such as the power lines, hospitals, fire hydrants and sewer as well as water lines among others. This information is important for action in public safety. The GIS is enabled to meet the most basic of the information needs to the most advanced as the complexity of the situation increases. The downside of GIS is that it requires high memory storage only available in desktop; it works only when there is network access and requires complicated software. What appears to be the best plan for public response? The National Response Framework is the best plan in as far as public response if concerned.