The City of Philadelphia Situational Awareness Portal project—developed collaboratively with geographIT®, a division of EBA Engineering, Inc.—has received an Honor Award in the American Council of Engineering Companies of Metropolitan Washington (ACEC/MW) 2017-2018 Engineering Excellence Awards competition. Rizwan Siddiqi, Bruce Stauffer, and Brian Wells accepted the award at an awards gala on January 30, 2018, in Arlington, Virginia.

ACEC’s annual Engineering Excellence Awards competition recognizes engineering firms for projects that demonstrate an exceptional degree of innovation, complexity, achievement, and value.

“This is an innovative, valuable project that is helping employees in Philadelphia every day,” said EBA President and CEO Rizwan Siddiqi, PE. “We’re proud of the entire team and thankful for this honor.”

Philadelphia’s situational awareness portal ensures that the city’s emergency response teams in the field and at the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) can view the same real-time information displayed on interactive web maps and applications using Esri’s Enterprise ArcGIS platform. The system is in use 24 hours a day to plan, monitor, and manage emergency response from within the EOC and from field locations using cellphones or tablets.

The system was in use during the July 2016 National Democratic Convention and the SEPTA strike in November 2016, and the 2017 NFL Draft. It is used daily to monitor and manage large and small emergency management events in Philadelphia.

With the system processing millions of data points each day, users can see constant streams of real-time information that help officials monitor and respond to any situation, from a large protest to a breakdown of a bus transporting conventioneers.

The team also developed a mobile tracking application to help locate staff during deployments, as well as an “event tracking” widget for Esri’s Web Application Builder, which is used to manage an incident workflow from start to finish, such as locations of street closures caused by downed trees or utility wires.

“The situational awareness platform provides the Office of Emergency Management with a critical tool that is used daily to monitor planned and emergency events throughout the city,” said Daniel Bradley, Director of Emergency Management for the City of Philadelphia.

Esri awarded the City of Philadelphia Office of Emergency Management a Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award for the project at the 2017 International User Conference.

The City of Philadelphia is home to more than 1.5 million people and is the largest city in Pennsylvania and the sixth-largest in the nation.