Application of Geospatial Technology in Disaster Management with A Focus on Urban Incident Response And Monitoring: Case Study of Shillong Urban Area

Geospatial Technology has become an important and indispensable tool for planning, monitoring, assessment and analysis of disaster events; therefore, it is highly recommended by many policy makers, engineers, disaster managers and the reason for this is because of its comprehensive visualization, analytics, modeling functionalities of the geographical entities. Fire incidents in urban areas have become a problem with the increasing building built-ups an ever-increasing population, with the increasing population density cases of fire incidents has also risen up. The functionalities of the Fire & Emergency services in the recent trend have now become multi-tasking and demanding in the urban areas, therefore there is a need in the intervention of Geospatial Technology for assessing, gap analysis, incident reporting, inventorying, refining and improving the services in the urban scenario. This research examines on how Geospatial Technologies can be utilize for disaster incident pre- planning, incident data collection, analysis of the fire incident trends, inventorying of disaster incidents, assessing of the existing coverage areas of the Fire &Emergency services using proximity analysis and network analysis, establishing the relation of other non-spatial attributes with the fire incidents particularly in urban Shillong areas and ranking of the fire zones based on population density factor. For this research study QGIS and ArcGIS was used for data processing and analysis, Google Earth pro was used to collect the locations of F&EMS stations, Hospitals, and localities. Urban Shillong area and town boundary was obtained from open-source data. Road network data was collected through open-source data sources; it was rectified and improved in the QGIS environment with the help of HCMGIS plugins for basemaps overlaying. Population data for the major town in urban Shillong area was collected from census website. Fire incidents were collected from the F&EMS department, and also augmented with news report data. Epicollect mobile application was used to demonstrate the use of mobile application in incident reporting and also locating, the data was later used for simulation in assessing the response time and also locating of the nearest health facility center. For landslide incident data meant for inventorying into the GIS database system open GSI data was downloaded and used for overlay analysis. The field trial of Epicollect mobile application have resulted in effective incident data collection and inventorying which can be used by F&EMS department in further analysis and also maintaining a digital data with a geospatial element incorporated into the incident data.