Base Mapping and Geomatic Services

OFC

Digital Road Atlas and the Office of the Fire Commissioner

In British Columbia the Office of the Fire Commissioner has primary responsibility for structural fire prevention and coordinating fire fighting resources during a provincial State of Emergency resulting from urban interface fires. The Fire Commissioner has the authority to issue evacuation Orders when areas are threatened by fires or explosions. Although the OFC issues evacuation Orders, it is the RCMP and local fire prevention officials who are responsible for the actual evacuation. In the past, evacuation area descriptions (the geographic boundaries) were written into the formal evacuation Order and were subject to an ambiguous interpretation.

As a result of the devastating forest fires of 2003, the OFC implemented an Emergency Management GIS System (Emergeo) to aid them with their evacuation planning. One of the key objectives of the system is to be able to produce a map of the evacuation area and a list of all roads and addresses within that area. A secondary objective is to be able to find a particular street or intersection that delineates the boundaries of the evacuation area.

The Digital Road Atlas provided by the Base Mapping and Geomatics Services Branch of the Integrated Land Management Bureau was able to satisfy these system objectives and merged seamlessly with the Emergeo application. The OFC is now able to quickly produce maps showing roads within an evacuation area and an accompanying list of addresses. This functionality provides a useful collaborative tool for working with other organizations and removes the the ambiguity associated with a strictly written evacuation description - "a picture is worth a thousand words."

Following are maps and list of street names within the evacuation area associated with the Town Creek/Lillooet fire in the summer of 2003.

Streets within Town Creek/Lillooet Evacuation Area - (Partial list only)