18 Apr 11 Crisis mapping – California private schools and affiliations

I’m finding myself spending more and more time on something I used to do – emergency and disaster preparation and response.  Many years ago, I was a paramedic and headed a volunteer team for the Salvation Army’s Emergency Disaster Services in western Pennsylvania.  About six years ago, I returned to the field a bit by getting involved in critical incident stress management, went last year to Haiti with a medical team after the earthquake, and I’m working with the Santa Clara Fire Department on citizen preparedness.

Schools are important because they house a vulnerable population, children, and because they often end up being used as shelters when a major disaster hits.  I’ve been working on mapping California schools by pulling data from state web sites, adding geographic tagging as needed and putting it into a format that can be mapping with various tools, including Google Maps.  Below is a link to a map using data I’ve stored in Google Fusion Tables, which allows you to see all of California’s private schools and filter by their religious affiliation, which is helpful because churches often are also involved in disaster response.

California Private Schools – Note that you can zoom in, pan, etc., to view a particular area of the state.  You can also click on the icons to get detailed information about the school.

The underlying data is available as a Fusion Table.