Abstract:
Nowadays, Disasters are unavoidable. Frequencies of Disasters are very high. India is
a country with a population of approximately 1 .25 billion, as population increases force to
use areas sensitive to disaster. Natural hazards (i.e. earthquakes, floods, landslides etc) turn
into disaster when they hit the man-made environment that causes lives and properties loss.
Due to increase in frequency and intensity of natural disasters the proper disaster mitigation
and management planning is inevitable. Disaster cannot be stopped but it can be minimized
to take better decision making during disaster.
To effectively reduce the impact of various disasters by availability of spatial data this
helps the managers for better decision-making at the time of disaster. Geographical
Information System (GIS) can play a very important role to support spatial planning for
disaster management as a powerful tool for collecting, storing, analyzing, modelling and
displaying large amount of data. Designing a GIS to distribute geospatial information on a
network such as Web, gives an opportunity to the managers to easy decision making to get
the information about disaster any time and any where they are. Web GIS Decision Support
System for Disaster Management enables timely insights, better communication thus making
the information rapidly available for better preparedness and action.
Preparedness and mitigation for disasters are very useful to face disaster effectively
i.e. minimize loss of life and property cause by disaster. During any disaster, response, rescue
and relief operation are also important phase of disaster management to reduce the effects of
disaster. These operations are critical when all the existing transportation system get damaged
due to disaster. In that case, most of victim trapped in disaster hit areas resulting increased
casualities. For immediate rescue and relief, escape routes play a major role to evacuate
victims from disaster affected areas to safe places.
In this study, real-time escape routes are generated and access on Web for evacuation
purposes. The real-time escape routes can be generating by using Model builder in ArcG1S
with various parameters and linked on Web using open source tool like Openlayers and
Geoserver etc. All generated escape routes can be easily used as walk able paths and to
evacuate victim to safe places during worst circumstances in order to reduce casualities and
the impact of disaster.
