Bay County, Florida
Hurricane Ivan Emergency Planning

On Sunday September 12, 2004, as Hurricane Ivan crossed the western tip of Cuba, the Bay County Emergency Operations Center (EOC) announced to local news outlets that an evacuation order was being issued for some Bay County residents. In addition to a map being available at the EOC offices, they unexpectedly announced residents could check the Bay County Online map to determine if their address was located within an affected evacuation zone.

Shortly after the broadcast of the 11pm news in Bay County, the Latitude Geographics pager started beeping in Victoria, BC. Hosted by Latitude Geographics, the Bay County ArcIMS site provides access to county planning and zoning information—and typically gets about 300 users per day. When the Latitude Geographics administrator checked the server, were 600 users simultaneously accessing the interactive map.

While Latitude Geographics staff worked around the clock to respond to demand for evacuation information, Okalahoma County, a co-location client, donated emergency server capacity to support Bay County. Being located in tornado alley, Oklahoma County is no stranger to natural disasters.

In the day and a half prior to the actual evacuation, over 300,000 map requests were processed—about 100 times ordinary site traffic.

Hurricane Ivan tore across Bay County two days later, taking several lives and leaving millions of dollars in property damage. Though terrible, many recognized the damage and human toll could have been much worse.

Since Hurricane Ivan, the site has experienced an overall increase in use. “More people are now aware of the site, and how they can use it to get answers to their mapping-related questions” explains Missy Beyers, GIS Technician at Bay County. For example, local Tyndall Air Force Base has used the Bay County IMS application for processing reimbursements for expenses associated with the evacuation.

Providing emergency hurricane planning to the public was not pre-planned and caught both Bay County GIS staff and Latitude Geographics by surprise. An alert system has been established an can provide advance notice about possible traffic increases.

Lydia Ambrose, GIS Coordinator at Bay County noted, “Having this sort of tool so convenient and accessible was of tremendous benefit to local residents”.

“Aside from gathering some great data for planning response to future traffic spikes, the most fascinating thing is that, to my knowledge, this is one of the first examples of the general public embracing Internet mapping as a planning tool during an emergency,” notes Steven Myhill-Jones, President of Latitude Geographics, “and there really isn’t a more ideal medium than Internet mapping for communicating this type of information.”

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