GIS Capability to Rapid Responder Crisis Management — How 1996 is this?

Prepared Response, Inc., a Seattle-based developer of crisis management planning and response systems, announced today it has added Geographic Information System (GIS) functionality to the Web-based version of its Rapid Responder crisis management system…

Additional GIS functionality under development, through GPS integration, includes the cataloguing and tracking of mobile infrastructure such as ships, containers, rail, and fleet assets…..

Read the rest of this announcement here:

OK, I guess I’m not in the best of moods today, so I better try to reel in my fishline hooks and as an old boss once advised me, take some of the wire brush bristles out of my writing. But it’s really hard not to throw out a comment like my 1996 dig when I see 2006 companies still trying to spin new thread out of old.The simple little GPS Tracking units I sell along with the included special purpose software ahs been displaying GIS-generated maps for years.

Back in hurricane Katrina one of my former consulting clients had some great screen caps and message logs from Red Cross vehciles in the path of the storm, where a single vehicle tracking transceiver and keyboard were responsible for several hundred emergency responders (because expensive vehicle voice radios and cell phone networks were dead, and expensive satellite voice phones use a frequency band that doesn’t work in heavy precipitation).  For some reason I can’t get the Red Cross headquarter’s folks to allow me to publish this data … maybe they don’t want the world to see just how tenuous their communication links really were … but at any rate, if you are involved with planning or actual execution of the emergency response mission, run, don’t walk from offerings that do not track _and_ communication with the emergency response vehciles.