Transportation Emergencies – First Responders Can Benefit from Free Spatial Data Emergency Planning and Response

For emergency first responders just starting up a GIS program, there’s generally a lot of effort in locating spatial data. It just so happens that there is a lot of free or low cost spatial data to be found on your state’s GIS website and links from there. But critical infrastructure datasets for planning and responding to transportation emergencies is also available from another site. This set of data deals with transportation – railroads, ports, bridges, airports, and freight terminals – all of which might be the site of your next hazardous materials incident.

If you’re a fire or police department looking for transportation data for emergency planning and response, I suggest a likely source is the US Department of Transportation’s National Transportation Atlas Database for 2009. Updated files for 2010 are coming soon either on the web or DVDs.

On this site, you’ll find several specific databases dealing with all kinds of ground and air transportation, such as hazardous materials routes data from the state departments of transportation, railway networks, navigable waterways, and other data, some gathered from other sources like the Census Bureau. But the value is that a lot of what you might need for transportation emergencies is right here, free, and formatted for use. The downloadable files contain shapefiles, index files, dBASE attribute data, spatial indices, and metadata, all in the familiar ESRI formats.