Use of geographical information system data for emergency management points of distribution analysis with POD Locator...

In 2010, the article Location and Analysis of Emergency Management Point of Distributions (PODs) for Hurricane Ike was published in the Journal of Emergency Management. Using a program titled point of distribution locator (POD Locator 1.0), the article reported a 46 percent improvement in positioning PODs over the locations selected by emergency managers during Hurricane Ike in 2008. While the program could produce more effective POD locations for a given situation, a major weakness of the program was the difficulty with which population and location data were manually entered into the program for subsequent analysis. This prevented organizations that could have otherwise benefited from the program from successfully utilizing it without additional training. This research effort focuses on the leveraging of readily available geographic information system (GIS) electronic data to address this problem. Analysis of the difference between the previous manual data entry method and the GIS assisted method was statistically significant.