Part III of Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

GIS can play a very important and unique role in disaster response and management. "GIS technology is used to collect, store, analyze, and share geospatial information needed by agencies to effectively support operations and restore disaster-affected communities."(ESRI.COM) Because of it's specialization in geospatial information, GIS can make issues such as which areas are the most impacted as well as how wide of an area is impacted by a natural hazard or disaster much easier to identify. By identifying areas of potential affect geographically it can make first responders jobs much more efficient and possibly easier especially when lives are at stake. In the event of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill GIS is playing a major role in staging areas for incident command posts, boom deployment, environmentally sensitive land, as well as help in forecasting potential landing areas of oil for on shore and offshore clean up. Not only can GIS be used to help disaster response agencies such as NOAA, EPA, USGS, etc... but volunteers such as Waterkeepers know where they are needed the most with the production of specialized maps of general areas. GIS is essentially the ultimate technology for prioritizing in emergency response during a major disaster such as we face with today's man made catastrophe.

Here is a link to my oil spill animation from April 29th to May 26th, 2010. You must have the latest version of Window's Media Player to view the avi. file. Oil Spill Animation

I found that I could not get the layers to open one by one in a new grouped layer so I just added them one by one as usual therefore opening the background along with the oil data. There is also the issue with a flutter everytime it opens in WMP for the first time. Cool option though and could be very useful in a Power Point presentation.