Tonight's topic was the police, which in our town is sub-contracted to the County Sheriff. We got the Grand Tour. One wistful episode, I saw a GIS map hanging on the wall that I used to work on, in fact, was responsible for maintaining, the Emergency Management Grid Database. The EMGD is a 1/4 square mile grid (4 cells, a half-mile on a side, to each Land Office section that overlays the whole county. Each grid cell is numbered, and these cells are used to plan and coordinate emergency action like flood control or hurricane damage assessment. These numbers drive a whole suite of computer programs which display data and assign resources in the event of a natural disaster. It is part of the Emergency Operations Center war room display.

The database must be constantly maintained since city boundaries and unincorporated areas are constantly changing, causing each cell to change municipal jurisdiction and responsible agency. The County annexed a big piece of an adjoining County last year, and the grid needs to be extended there, which means re-numbering all the cells and reassigning them to new cities, and pointing all those GIS applications to the new database.

Also, the new FEMA standard Military UTM map projection and Grid system which now by law replaces the old Florida State Plane coordinates and Lat/Lon grids we used to use is not on this map. I.e., it's way out of date, and I guess they haven't hired someone to do my old job. Budget cuts, I guess.

And Hurricane season starts in June.