Springfield builds geographic app to enhance emergency response 

During the January 2024 ice storm, a thick layer of ice toppled trees and power poles in Lane County, leading to damaged homes and widespread power outages. 

Springfield residents critiqued the city on how officials communicated their storm response to residents, especially those in the hardest hit areas, Assistant City Manager Niel Laudati told Lookout Eugene-Springfield. He said residents needed more direct communication about how to access resources like firewood, propane and water, especially if they were stuck in their homes. 

The city realized how Springfield residents fared in the winter conditions depended on where they lived, and the city’s response needed to reflect that. The Thurston and Kelly Butte neighborhoods were without power for days, while the flatland areas or those farther west experienced less severe impacts, Laudati said. 

“That’s when we started to realize we need to come up with a system that allows us to better understand how different neighborhoods of Springfield experience emergencies,” Laudati said.

So the city tasked its Geographic Information Systems department with building the Springfield Emergency Response Application, also referred to as SERA. The web-based application compiles geographic information that city staff can use to gain insight on who lives in various parts of the community and what they need during an emergency. 

“We got lots of feedback, and it was not positive,” Laudati said of the days after the storm. “I mean, the majority was, ‘You need to do better,’ and so that’s what we’re trying to do here.”

How SERA works

Chris Zeitner, a geographic information systems architect with the city of Springfield, said his department created the program using software called Esri, which the city was already paying for. The program is not public-facing, though it may include a community communication tool in the future. 

Zeitner and his team created the application last summer and fall so that it was ready for severe winter weather.

“And it’s not isolated to just ice or winter storm responses,” he said. “We could use it for fire or flood or any number of different events.” 

While staff are storing information in the program, such as planned shelter locations and distribution sites, they have not used the application during an emergency yet. 

The program allows staff to plot incidents or locations during emergencies, such as weather warnings, evacuation notices, impacted infrastructure, shelters, distribution sites, road closures and more. 

Staff can then draw a boundary on the map and the application will provide some metrics on the population within that area. These data include how many children or people over age 65 live in the area, how many households don’t have internet access or a vehicle, and how many residents are below the poverty level, among other information. This helps staff focus on vulnerable populations that may need more assistance during an emergency.

“It just allows us to have a high-level overview of what’s occurring inside these areas,” Zeitner said, and that information can drive the city’s response.

Wellness checks during an emergency

The application can also supply addresses within a selected boundary and feed those into a welfare check form within the program. In the event of an emergency where residents are stuck inside their homes, such as those in hard-hit neighborhoods during the ice storm, emergency responders, city staff and/or volunteers would be granted access to the program to conduct wellness checks.

The platform can track within a boundary which homes have received a wellness check, what supplies they requested and if those supplies have been delivered. The check asks if residents need items like medical supplies, food, water, firewood or fuel, and if they need to go to a shelter. Officials can then look at this data and determine how much firewood, propane, food and water is needed and coordinate getting those supplies to residents.

City staff are coordinating neighborhood contact points, which are residents who have been identified as reliable local contacts to conduct wellness checks.

This allows the city “to start making more data-driven decisions to help serve the needs of the citizens,” Zeitner said. 

City staff crafted the wellness check questions based on needs expressed by residents to city staff after the ice storm, such as having access to propane tanks or firewood. A community resource center at Springfield City Hall, which provided residents with food boxes and firewood, opened after the storm began. 

Zeitner hopes this leads to a better experience for people who are in the middle of an emergency. 

Staff are working to build a Community Lifelines dashboard into the program that the public could access. This would allow a resident to enter their address and receive information on topics such as active evacuations and shelters. 

What else could SERA be used for?

While the application is currently programmed to work best in the event of another winter storm, it could work well during an earthquake, flood or fire. 

“We really built it with the holistic approach of, this can be adaptable to anything,” he added.

Zeitner said flood modeling scenarios based on the 42nd Street Levee being breached could be programmed into the application. The levee, which is undergoing an assessment to determine what is needed to bring it up to federal standards, protects parts of Springfield from flooding from the McKenzie River.

Programming flood effects and preplanning a response would allow for equipment to be deployed more quickly. 

“That’s the advantage of a tool like this, we can just act in an instant,” Zeitner said. “So I think that’s probably the next step, is starting to model some of that in here so we do have it ready in case that happens.”