We had a great meeting last week at Cal Poly Pomona. The presentations were fantastic, informative and timely. Our next meeting will be in February 2009. I hope to have it in Orange County. I want to move the meetings around the region in fairness to all of our users.
One of the items I announced was the creation of a SoCalHUG group forum. It is a place where we can post questions and answers regarding HAZUS, we can post tips and tricks, we can ask surveys about issues important to our user group and we can post documents that we produce. For example, I have posted the answers to the survey I asked awhile back regarding who is using HAZUS in Southern California, level of use and who needs training.
I also have posted directions on how to add a shake map to HAZUS. Our user Sharon Wong wrote the original, but Kevin Mickey has given us an update.
I will also post the presentations from our meetings so if you missed our meeting last week, you can still view them from your desktop. I think this will be a useful tool, especially when we have our next major earthquake and your agency has asked you to run HAZUS but you have forgotten how to do something. This can also be useful for HAZUS runs for Golden Guardian and your agency's Hazard Mitigation plan.
We can help each other out using this forum, I encourage you to sign up to the SoCalHUG forum. To subscribe to the SoCalHUG forum ,
click here...
I also announced items from the National Conference held in San Diego early August. FEMA says presentations from the August National Conference will be posted on the FEMA HAZUS site in mid-September.
There is a new service pack for HAZUS on FEMA's website that fixes problems with the Flood module from locking up. Also there is a new version of Comprehensive Data Management System (CDMS). CDMS provides users with the capability to update and manage statewide and HAZUS datasets, which are used to support analysis in the HAZUS-MH. Once data are imported in the statewide datasets, the CDMS will allow users to query, sort, export and print information. Please discard the previous version if you downloaded it as it was a beta version. Both the service patch and the CDMS can be downloaded from the
FEMA web site.
The third major announcement was there are two HAZUS certification programs being offered at
EMI. You can check these certification programs as well as other Emergency Management classes at the EMI web site,
click here.
The next version of HAZUS is scheduled to be released in late winter (late February or early March). This version will also use ArcGIS 9.3. I'll make sure to inform you when it is released.
Again, I encourage each of you to subscribe to our forum so we can share more information to assist each other out. As Dr. Lucy Jones has been telling us this last two years "we are all in this together".
SoCalHUG Leader
Labels: 2008 Meeting Minutes, August 28
