1. Introduction

The purpose of this study was to assist US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in its initiative to complete an internal review to assess and evaluate response operations relative to Emergency Support Function (ESF) #3 support to the September 11th, 2001 disasters at the Pentagon and World Trade Center (WTC). Through its February 14, 2002 Request for Proposals, the Corps of Engineers solicited the services of The George Washington University (GWU) Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management (ICDRM) to assist in the review by providing an external assessment perspective to their after-action process.

A grant meeting was held on March 4, 2002 at the USACE Headquarters that involved the GWU team members and members of the USACE Headquarters Operations Division. The objective was to set the parameters for the GWU team assessment of USACE activities after the September 11th attacks. In this meeting it was decided that the focus of the GWU study would be the Geospatial Technologies (GIS, Remote Sensing, spatially explicit modeling) used in response to the WTC attack, and how USACE could improve their operations through the use of these technologies. The USACE requested the research team to look at the use of Geospatial Technologies (GTs), particularly by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the City of New York (NYC) and to identify those GTs that could be of value to the USACE in its ESF#3 functions. To facilitate the process, the USACE provided contact information for some key USACE and FEMA officials that were involved in the WTC response operations.

The general objectives of this study were determined to be:

1. 1. to identify and document the Geospatial Technologies that were used at the WTC by the Federal, state and local organizations, as well as by the private sector and Non-government Organizations, and assess the usefulness of these GTs;


2. 2. to find out the type of improvements that can be made either to these technologies or their use so that they can be best utilized for future response operations of the USACE; and,


3. 3. through this assessment, provide an input to the USACE and FEMA Remedial Action Program.

The USACE requested that the GWU team look at the type of data the USACE should try to have, in the context of the WTC event, before a disaster, to effectively use those GTs. If the USACE were to invest in data acquisition, what would be the best way to go about doing that? Or if they do not invest in data, what information would they need to rapidly acquire after the disaster has occurred and where do they get that information? Since local governments produce many of the data sets, USACE was interested in having the GWU team find out whether local governments hold those data themselves, and if so, what their plans for updating are and how they archive the dynamic data. It is also of interest to find out whether critical facilities should be identified by the USACE, and have local partners work on more local data, and whether there should be/is a central clearinghouse for critical data.