Understanding the location of Personnel and Assets within Public Safety is a challenging issue, but one well worth spending time trying to manage. GIS is a natural tool to pull this information together – and important because Resource Status information is a fundemental component of any Situational Awareness environment. A solid understanding of where resources are deployed and staged contributes to safety and incident resolution in the most important ways.

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Crawl The first step with limited resources is to adopt GIS Standard Operating Procedures that dictate that you will map incidents and use those maps (and that understanding) to manage resources. Hardcopy mapping displaying the incident allow decision makers insight and can be used (even with Sharpies) to mark up these maps into divisions, branches, and sections – geographic areas – in which to assign and track resources.	Walk Next, publishing the map to an interactive website (allowing panning and zooming) enables the agency to communicate a representation of the incident that is always official and updated. It solves the problem created by distribution of lots of paper maps that can create confusion with different versions.	Run When you need to track and monitor personnel, vehicles, vessels and aircraft in real-time, you often inherit an ecosystem that is full of many different types of reporting, AVL, GPS, satellite trackers, smart phones, etc. Instead of replacing all of the solutions you encounter a good approach is to utilize a solution that merges all of the existing tracking into one, consolidated feed for you to visualize in the context of GIS.
Example: Wenatchee Complex Briefing Map	Example: Incident Information System	Example: Tracking Software

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