REDLANDS >> Redlands on Friday became a hotbed of people stepping up to help Easterners through the turmoil caused by Hurricane Matthew.
Redlands Fire Chief Jeff Frazier has been called in to help with search and rescue efforts during Hurricane Matthew.
And government agencies are using Redlands tech company Esri’s online platform ArcGIS to track the hurricane in real time.
Frazier got the call from the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Friday morning and was on a plane for Georgia that afternoon.
“I don’t have a lot of information on our mission at this point,” Frazier said by phone before boarding the airplane. “I just know we’re there to support FEMA in their urban search and rescue.”
“There is a significant deployment of personnel that’s already in position over there,” Frazier added.
Frazier, who has assisted in many other disasters across the country, said he expects his role to be assisting in the emergency operations center and cooperating with local resources.
“It’s a privilege and an honor to get called up and try to help in some of these incidents,” he said. “I hope to do my best to contribute to as positive of an outcome that we can get at this juncture.”
Among the agencies seeking Esri’s assistance is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which launched a public website on Wednesday, nga.maps.arcgis.com, to track response efforts.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is using Esri products in several ways, including tracking anchorage of vessels in Jacksonville, Florida.
Esri worked with the Office of Coast Survey on a user-friendly website called nowcoast.noaa.gov, said Guy Noll, maritime GIS consultant at Esri.
“It’s actually, I think, the best place to go to see the hurricane track and be able to click on and understand the wave state and the winds for all the hurricanes,” he said.
Noll said in a phone interview that Esri helped the website migrate into NOAA’s internal cloud.
It was able to maintain service Thursday night while other parts of NOAA’s computing infrastructure were getting slammed by the amount of web traffic Hurricane Matthew is generating, he said.
