Digital Sandbox Insights
White papers, case studies, webinars and other information from Digital Sandbox and key industry experts provide a community resource on the latest advances in the field.
Case Study
South Carolina “Gets Visual” with Digital Sandbox Risk Analytics
As part of its Geographic Information System (GIS) strategy, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) identified the need to add critical value-added applications to the agency’s existing ESRI GIS framework. Risk Management was identified as a key focus area for this initiative. SLED’s goal was to upgrade their solution to deliver the best possible risk management capability.
Webinar
Critical Infrastructure Protection - A Look at Current Best Practices in Homeland Security
Listen as Brian Wright, Critical Infrastructure Program Director of the New York State Office of Homeland Security discusses how they built such a successful program, what lessons they learned along the way, and how your organization can benefit from their example.
White Paper
Population in Homeland Security Risk Applications
Population is an extremely valuable part of the overall risk picture and represents 40% of DHS’ homeland security grant risk formula. Population is relevant for any given scenario and is a valuable component of local homeland security capabilities including public warnings, evacuations, sheltering, injuries, and fatalities. Identifying a defensible number and demographic profile (e.g. age, gender, poverty) of people within a given area is vital to planning and responding based on the risk to a given area’s population.
The consequences of certain threat types are much more population-centric than asset-centric. For example, an earthquake can cause higher rates of fatality, hospitalization, sheltering, and long-term social welfare than an IED which is immediate and typically on a smaller-scale. Local jurisdictions need to approach population risk differently for each. Furthermore, some threat types affect certain population types much differently than others. For example, hurricanes affect socially vulnerable populations more than other people. Identifying these people prior to landfall is valuable to emergency planning. According to Census data, the most commonly used source for population, no one lives in the World Trade Center or Pentagon. However, on September 11th 2,729 people died in these buildings. As this example illustrates, an in-depth understanding of dynamic population is vital to homeland security and emergency management. This paper outlines Digital Sandbox’s approach to building a unique and defensible estimation of population and key demographic variables.
Fact Sheet
Likelihood Fact Sheet
Risk is Vulnerability x Consequence x Threat Likelihood. The Likelihood Assessment allows the user to set Threat Likelihood values for assets against threats.
Threats in the system are broken into 3 high level categories: accidental, natural, intentional/terrorism. Likelihood assessments for each threat category must be done separately because the definition and calculation of likelihood between the threat categories differs.
Research & More
With Haiti in Mind, New England Assesses Quake Risks
New England sits on the center of the North American tectonic plate, one of nine large plates that make up the earth’s crust; while many earthquakes occur along plate boundaries, such as in California and Haiti, in New England they happen on faults that are reactivated as the earth is squeezed by plates along the West Coast and mid-Atlantic states; about twenty small quakes affect New England annually; the largest recent one was a magnitude 4.2 in 2006 near Bar Harbor, Maine; many buildings in the region will not be able to withstand a tremor in the range of 6.0 or higher on the Richter scale.