GIS in Disaster Management - Essay Example

Disasters can disrupt the whole routine and activities of the affected country, nation, or city. It can result in serious accidents, mishaps and calamities. Therefore, it is essential that the disasters are processed, managed and useful steps are taken to ensure that the routine of the affected place can get back to normal (Mishra, pp. 172-173, 2002).

Geography Information System, also known as GIS, is one of the effective methods of disaster management. This ensures that the least of the wastages happen once after the disaster has taken place, or it completely tries to curb the foreseen disasters from happening altogether. GIS is a method of looking into the geography, topography, of the affected place, or the vulnerable places to disaster so that effective methods of preserving the areas could be brought up to handle the situation in the best possible manner. GIS allows the Disaster Management Departments to closely look into the issues, recognize, examine and make trends of the issues that are occurring, through high technology software that helps the investigators to come up with the best possible and accurate results. Therefore, the system of GIS can help the disaster management teams to come up with the most effective ways of ensuring that the mishaps that have happened should not happen in the future, and try to prevent the expected disasters to happen in the present time (United Nation Center for Regional Development, pp. 6, 1996).

 In spite of all the advantages to GIS, it tends to have a few drawbacks as well. GIS has developed through the years as an advanced means of preparing countries, or other disaster-struck areas against the perils of mishaps and wastages. Nevertheless, GIS can be a very problematic method of understanding and evaluating the concerning situations. One of the problems while using GIS or other mapping methods to investigate for and plan regarding disaster management is that GIS involves studying large areas of lands even outside the area of study and involves huge amounts of elaborated details to ensure that the best decisions be made.

Secondly, GIS also involves other detailed information while investigating areas of concern apart from the GIS information that is recorded. This causes the whole procedure of investigation very hectic and tiresome for the investigators. Also, it makes the management process to be very time-consuming that can result in ineffective measures (Nadine, pp 86, 2004). Also, the fact that the process of using GIS is itself very technical; it involves critically analyzing each and every factor on the maps and analyzing the best results is not something that everyone can do.

The process of effectively using the methods of GIS involves very skillful workers and critical analysis of every single detail. Any individual but trained professionals cannot do this (Drew, pp 103-104, 2001). The method of GIS helps countries, cities, and other security and management departments to analyze any sort of disasters or threats that may occur in the future and help them come up with the best possible ways of tackling them. However, it is essential that the methods of GIS are used while keeping in mind their drawbacks as well, to ensure that the best possible results come up (Nadine, pp 163, 2004).