An Open-Source Vision for HAZUS

Despite the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA having spent $63M developing and administering the disaster management software Hazards U.S. HAZUS over the last decade, the system’s 2008 rating by the Office of Management and Budget was only “moderately effective.” Today’s proprietary HAZUS software code precludes usage of two major advancements in the computing industry, namely the burgeoning opensource community and the advent of sophisticated, Internet-based applications. A 2007 National Research Council study entitled “Improving Disaster Management: The Role of IT in Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery” proclaimed “federal, state and local agencies should embrace . . . open source software and open standards development” to complement traditional IT acquisition.” In accordance with current FEMA strategic planning and performance-based program management, a new software development paradigm is needed to update HAZUS and propel it to the forefront of the next generation of disaster management software tools. Although HAZUS is distributed at no cost by FEMA, the program’s functionality is restricted by an underlying commercial off-the-shelf COTS and closed-source geographic information system GIS . Originally, two commercial GIS programs were supported: ArcGIS and MapInfo. As features were added, ESRI’s ArcGIS became the platform of choice. A large portion of the development work today is spent keeping HAZUS synchronized with ArcGIS upgrades. Furthermore, from its infancy HAZUS has been developed on a single, closed-source operating system namely, Microsoft Windows . The linkage with ArcGIS and Windows has precluded capitalizing on a decade of explosive Internet growth and today’s innovative Web services infrastructure. Multiple users on a distributed HAZUS system are not part of today’s reality. Proprietary, stand alone, and single-user disaster management systems prevent efficient data gathering and sharing capabilities and result in circumscribed utility and productivity. Thus, the shortsighted HAZUS system architecture hampers the field of disaster mitigation, and as the software quietly and unofficially becomes a tool for response and recovery efforts, a redesign for expanded functionality and improved performance is even more imperative. The real need is to replace the proprietary, standalone desktop version of HAZUS with a three-tier, distributed architecture based on open source design and development principles. The three tiers should include: 1 a data tier on the server , where the database