WASHINGTON, May 2 (UPI) -- Federal agencies are not yet using a new National Grid mapping system designed to help them operate in emergencies.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency and other federal agencies have adopted the National Grid, but "the standard has not been implemented by the agency or in the emergency management sector," Talbot Brooks, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies at Delta State University, told National Journal in a report published Monday.
FEMA press secretary Aaron Walker told National Journal that the agency does use the National Grid -- but it didn't during Hurricane Katrina because most state and local agencies depended on street addresses or on latitude and longitude coordinates. "There certainly are maps for which we use National Grids; there's also maps for which we don't," Walker said.
The grid is the brainchild of the Public XY Mapping Project, a group of specialists who recognized the need for spatial mapping after Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Latitude and longitude measurements can be confusing.
Not all local responders even have GPS units, however. Some, such as the New Orleans Fire Department, use paper maps and municipal addresses to respond to rescue calls. The department had not trained its firefighters to use coordinate-based mapping, so when first responders from FEMA and the military got to Louisiana, they had to set up their own mapping systems.
"Nobody really thought about maps ahead of time -- like the need for hundreds of basic street maps of the coastal county areas for responders not from the local area," Brooks said. Many of the maps that responders finally got lacked coordinate references or differed from version to version, making it difficult for Brooks and his team to provide accurate assistance.
