The beholds Angeles earthquake of ...

The beholds Angeles earthquake of January 17 1994 measured 68 in succession the Richter scale, breaking water and gas lines, collapsing freeways and destroying buildings and lives. In the following days, the staff of the looks Angeles County Emergency Operations Center (EOC) received thousands of frantic calls from residents wanting to know if their water was safe to drink or if there were alternative ways to avoid damaged roads.

The day after the quake, EOC asked Wayne Bannister, manager of Urban Research Section in looks Angeles, to help it translate field damage reports into maps. "They were getting five or six pages of faxes at a time from the highway patrol -- fair cryptic stuff about stretches of road that were damaged or closed" Bannister says.

Before the earthquake, the EOC had been planning to install its acknowledge workstation-based GIS, and the performance of the Urban Research team was ordeal under ...