[Talk-us] Civil Defense Sirens?

[Lord-Castillo, Brett]

Just wondering what would be the purpose of mapping civil defense sirens? You have to make some significant decisions of what kind of information to include about the sirens (for example, without range and/or model, you cannot derive projected coverage; without directional coverage you cannot identify nearest covering siren). Sirens are also one of those areas (like mapping major pipelines) that do fall under homeland security protections for sunshine laws. Some jurisdictions (mostly cities) are open with their siren locations, some of them are very protective (mostly those places whose sirens have been subjected to attacks by siren hackers in the past or who have particularly significant security concerns). Mapping site specific sirens (like those used for electric generation facilities) can especially draw scrutiny.
As for the feasibility, I recently did a project to map 210 sirens from aerial photos and ground work, and it was virtually impossible without prior knowledge of the siren locations and high resolution aerial oblique photos. In all, it took about 60 hours of work (and that was with a list of locations).
--Brett

Brett Lord-Castillo
Information Systems Designer/GIS Programmer
St. Louis County Police
Office of Emergency Management
14847 Ladue Bluffs Crossing Drive
Chesterfield, MO 63017
Office: 314-628-5400
Fax: 314-628-5508
Direct: 314-628-5407



-----Original Message-----
Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 11:41:37 -0500
From: Jeffrey Ollie <jeff at ocjtech.us>
Subject: [Talk-us] Civil Defense Sirens?
To: talk-us <talk-us at openstreetmap.org>
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	<p2s935ead451005030941tc211dd40kadac3878aa447cfc at mail.gmail.com>
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With the start of Tornado season in the Midwest upon us, I thought it
would be interesting to map civil defense sirens:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_defense_siren

However, I can't find any existing examples and either I'm tired or
coming down with something but I can't really think of a good way to
tag these either.  As for rendering, we could use the International
Civil Defense symbol:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CivilDefence.svg

Might make a good project of the week too...

-- 
Jeff Ollie