Student Work at College of the Atlantic

Senior Builds a City’s Emergency System

Apoorv Gehlot, senior, working in the GIS Lab

It’s not unusual for College of the Atlantic students to do extraordinary work during their 10-week internships and 10-week senior projects. Students have created large gardens, conducted original fieldwork, completed novels, written business plans. But seldom does their work make a difference for an entire city.

Senior Apoorv Gehlot has built a GIS emergency management system for the Silicon Valley city of Cupertino, CA, population 55,000. Should disaster strike, thanks to Gehlot, the emergency operations manager will be able to see at a glance what buildings are safe, who needs medical attention, where supplies are stockpiled, which roads are passable. As situations change, the manager will be able to update the map within seconds, so as to direct emergency assistance.

The task evolved while Gehlot was working as an intern in Cupertino’s GIS department. He was asked to evaluate vendor proposals for a visual emergency preparedness system using GIS. Gehlot looked at what companies were offering and judged them costly, cumbersome and hard to update. He then offered to create the program himself, as a senior project—knowing that there’s no better learning than a real-life project.

Using a GIS program that works with online mapping, Gehlot created a dynamic system that allows for numerous contingencies, even overlaying a contour map on the city street system—should, for instance, the emergency be a flood and so the question of higher ground become important. “You can’t predict what data you’ll need,” notes Gehlot. Knowing that, he worked to incorporate as many variables as possible. Gas leaks, impassable roads, severely injured citizens, supply caches and save havens all have their symbols on the map, making the disaster easy to see and so more possible to handle. The program relies on a satellite, so it will work even if electricity and phone systems are down.

A screenshot of the emergency incident software

The system was tested during a planned emergency exercise—and reworked where necessary. His goal, Gehlot says, was to make a system “so flexible that after I hand it over, my part is done.” According to Cupertino administrators, he was fully successful. “The application proved to be extremely functional,” wrote Teri Gerhardt, the city’s GIS coordinator. “The Emergency Operations Center displayed the map on the main projector screen giving the entire room a bird’s eye view of the disaster as it was happening in our city.”

Armed with rave reviews for his “passion and motivation to succeed” by Cupertino officials, Gehlot, who graduates this month, is now the web mapping producer of the independent consultancy firm, G4 Global Tech. He hopes to interest cities around Cupertino in the program he’s already created, because, as he says, “Emergencies are not within cities, they happen in regions.”

He’s not stopping there. Gehlot has also been working with Acadia National Park to create another web-based GIS map, this pinpointing and mapping all the beetles, mayflies, spiders and other creatures found during the park’s annual bio-blitz, so researchers can spot micro-environmental trends in the park’s fauna.

Raised in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, Gehlot came to COA from the Mahindra United World College of India. When college admissions officers visited the school to pitch their programs, he asked each of them whether he would be able to bring his science or math ideas to an economics professor to create a business. Though he and his classmates were wooed by top US colleges, only the COA representative said, “Of course you can plan to apply science to a real world activity.”

Sure enough, COA’s faculty member in economics, Davis Taylor, was Gehlot’s advisor, while faculty member in math and physics, Dave Feldman, along with GIS Lab Director Gordon Longsworth, were his project advisors, helping Gehlot frame the project in a way that is as useful and universal as possible. Finally, Jay Friedlander, who holds the college’s Sharpe/McNally Chair in Green and Socially Responsible business, has assisted Gehlot with other aspects of his work, so Gehlot is leaving COA with a business plan under his belt. But what’s most rewarding, he says, “is that it can possibly help save lives.”

-Donna Gold