Courtesy of mema.state.md.us

Hurricane Katrina made its mark on the lives of many living in Louisiana or around the state.

John Morgan III, a professor in the department of geography and environmental planning, said the situation could have been dealt with better if more information concerning safety measures and evacuation was available during the storm and its aftermath.

Maryland residents haven’t had a source to provide information on the cause of a natural disaster, terrorist attack or other emergencies, according to Morgan. But he has created something that may fix that problem with the opening of a Web browser – the Maryland safeMAP, a graphical interface map that will provide the public with relevant geographical information for use in the case of an emergency.

Morgan served as the director of Towson’s Center for Geographical Information Systems for 13 years before returning to a teaching position five years ago. He said the idea of the map came from a few major questions.

“How does the public get information when an emergency occurs?” Morgan asked. “People didn’t know where public transportation [during Hurricane Katrina] was to be able to get out of the town. What to do when an emergency occurred? Where to go, where to find information and where to seek help? I felt we needed to have a similar application for the people here in Maryland.”

The new map is similar to one of Maryland’s earlier maps known as the Emergency Management Mapping Application, which was developed in 2004. Unlike EMMA, the Maryland safeMAP isn’t limited to state and local government.

“It gives people access to a large amount of information that would otherwise not have in one location,” Morgan said. “What we’ve done is we’ve brought a lot of different data together for the purpose of providing information to the public should an emergency occur.”

Morgan presented the new mapping system Friday, Nov. 19. The lecture discussed Morgan’s findings to an audience and demoed the map application.

Senior Alex Stapleton said Morgan’s presentation was attention getting.

“I thought it was actually pretty interesting that Dr. Morgan was trying to integrate a safe map into Maryland and emergency planning,” he said. “It’s really a unique insight, just looking at how we can adopt this project into our own safety in Maryland.”

David Sides, project manager for the CGIS, said he liked that the map has a lot of information that it’s easy for people to understand. Crowd sourcing, a term for people turning in information that could be provided as a source, stood out to him.

“I’m intrigued by the crowd sourcing aspect, where people out anywhere in the state [may] witness a flooded road,” Sides said. “They might take a picture and e-mail that to the application.”

Four Towson graduate students and one undergraduate from a geospatial and education lab were responsible for putting the map together as Morgan oversaw the development.

Morgan said the next goal for the map is to move it to other states, and he is currently looking for a means to do so.