Inside Information – After mapping the great outdoors, GIS finds a new role to play indoors.

Three students at Rogers High School in Spokane, Washington, were goofing off, chinning themselves on a water pipe. That is, until the pipe broke and water started gushing onto the gymnasium floor. If ever there was a need to know immediately where the shutoff valve for the water was, this was the time.

In some schools, that information is tucked into binders in school offices — hard to reach and difficult to fathom. Fortunately for Rogers High, shutoff valves are marked on a computerized map created for it and many other schools in Spokane. A resource officer from a school across town called up the map on his computer and radioed the shutoff valve’s location to his counterpart, who was down in the school basement on the hunt for the valve. Shutoff occurred within minutes.

For decades, mapping with geographic information systems has been used outdoors — for urban planning, environmental impact assessments, infrastructure inventories and other such needs. But the maps stopped at the door of the schoolhouse, as well as city hall and the statehouse. Now, GIS, which stores, edits, combines, analyzes and compares data spatially, is moving inside. The early adoptions can be traced to concerns about attacks — from deranged citizens to disturbed students to bona fide terrorists — that might require the securing of a building. Schools are the leading edge of the in-building trend. Washington State is mapping all of its K-12 buildings and its community colleges. Localities in at least 20 other states are mapping schools and other public facilities as well.

By ELLEN PERLMAN

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