Ground

Conducting a street level PDA is the method preferred by most emergency managers. This is how the majority of the IA PDAs are conducted. Groud level or street level PDAs consists of emergency responders traveling by foot or car, going house by house, structure by structure, determining the level of damage they observe on street sheets (paper forms). Usually using multiple teams, they conduct the damage assessment and then combine the individual street sheets and add all the data onto one spreadsheet, each line with an address, primary residence status, insurance status, level of damage, and other data.

More recently mobile geospatial information systems (GIS) devices were deployed with varying levels of success, usually because of the high learning curve of these GIS systems. With the proliferation of smart phones, many local, state and even FEMA have started using smart phone PDA applications. More and more emergency manager are replacing their pen and paper street sheets and tablet GIS devices with smart phone apps which utilize the internal GPS receiver.

In order for a smart phone/tablet PDA app to be useful it needs to meet these criteria.

Extremely Easy to Use - It needs to be so intuitive that users need little to no training to use it.
No Internet Required - Most often there is no internet connection available in a disaster affected area.
No Coding Required - Setup and deployment must not require any coding.
Spatial Referenced - The ability to view where you've visited and still need to visit is vital.
Cloud Based - Once an internet connection has been secured, multiple teams need to be able to share their portion of the PDA with a manager so results can be tabulated.
Cross Platform - Because of limited budget it will need to run on both iOS and Android devices.
Inexpensive - Emergency managers are often on very limited budgets so the cost needs to be low.

Emergency managers basically have two choices, build their own mobile application or use one that already meets the requirements listed above.

Fulcrum

After comparing many of the mobile data collection products on the market I came to the conclusion that Fulcrum met all my criteria listed above. Full disclosure, I liked Fulcrum so much, I went on to work for Fulcrum as their Product Manger.

In short, Fulcrum is a hosted mobile forms platform that enables users to build custom apps for capturing information from the field, like PDAs. Users can design forms using a web-based drag-and-drop designer and deploy their forms to their mobile workforce for gathering information like Text, Photos, SpatialVideo, SpatialAudio, Signatures, Barcodes, GPS Location, and more. It requires little training to build or collect information in the field. The PDA apps needed are already prepared on their website, so emergency managers have everything they need in a matter of minutes of signing up.

As data is being collected, users can view and analyze their data from a web browser or on their mobile app. The real-time data can then be analyzed in ArcGIS Desktop or QGIS and be published in real-time, using the Data Share feature, to any GIS platform like ArcGIS Online or CartoDB.

Setup Instructions

Start with one of the prebuilt PDA apps in Fulcrum’s App Gallery: Earthquake, Fire, Inundation, Wind. Each of these have the definitions FEMA uses to conduct their own damage assessments. In each app, there are menus outlining differences between Destroyed, Major Damage, Minor Damage and Affected. Once the app is in your Fulcrum account, create user accounts for whomever is headed into the affected area.

Deploy

Because Fulcrum is so easy to use, and the apps contain the classification definitions, it takes only moments to launch the app and start collecting. Those individuals conducting house-by-house assessments do not need to be highly trained with years of experience. The goal is to define the correct level of damage to the house and catalog photos of the house for verification later. On some occasions, there is no internet connection or mobile service. In these cases, it would help to cache map tiles on Fulcrum in the area you are headed, or load offline MBTile maps through the website and pull them to each device. To cache map tiles, just zoom into the areas you are going and scroll around. Keep in mind that even in most tornado events, cellular internet was still available, but slow. Joplin, MO and Moore, OK both had cell service in the hardest hit areas.

Pro Tip: Make sure when conducting the damage assessment that each point is placed on top of each house and not in the street where the assessor is standing.

To set up sharing, enable data shares from the app dashboard. While your assessment is on going you can send the CSV link to the FEMA Geospatial Coordinator in your region. You can find the correct individual by looking them up on this FEMA site. If you can’t find the Geospatial Coordinator for your region, call the FEMA Regional Office and ask for the contact information.