Bonner County GIS demos public evacuation-mapping app with 343 predefined zones; officials seek partner feedback

At a Bonner County workshop on May 11, the county GIS director, Michael, demonstrated a public-facing evacuation-mapping app and a set of 343 predefined evacuation zones the county plans to use to speed emergency notifications and clarify which properties are in which evacuation area.

Michael said the project grew out of an after-action report from the Flash/Sunset fire and that prose-based evacuation descriptions in brochures had caused confusion. "A map, a picture would clear up all those confusion," he said, and showed a demo where a resident can enter an address or use a phone's location to see their eVAC zone. Michael added that edits to zone status propagate to users in about five seconds.

Why it matters: County staff and responders told the group that unclear evacuation wording delayed public understanding during past fires and that a map accompanying public directions can reduce errors. Officials cautioned that predefined zones must balance being large enough to avoid missing at-risk areas and small enough to avoid unnecessary mass movement that could overwhelm staging areas.

In the presentation, Michael said the county's staff divided Bonner County into 343 zones using road networks and geographic features as the primary basis. He said the GIS team built an admin interface so authorized non-GIS personnel — for example, a sheriff's office representative or an incident partner — can change a zone's status without specialized GIS skills.

Participants pressed two operational points repeatedly: first, the need for on-the-ground validation (topography, road width, choke points) because the initial zones were created from desktop data; and second, the question of approval authority. The meeting chair warned that sending an incorrect map could itself "be a greater hazard," urging the group to define a chain of command for who can sign off and publish evacuation maps.

Another attendee, describing past fires, said over-evacuating broad areas had created staging and access problems: when people outside the immediate impact area moved en masse, there was insufficient space for people who truly needed to relocate. The attendee urged a metric or rubric that would make residents more likely to follow official directions.

Several participants suggested adding predetermined assembly points (for example, the fairgrounds) as pins on the map so nonlocal visitors or short-term renters could navigate to the right location. The group also discussed a distinction between automatically preloaded pins and locations that have been confirmed on the ground (for example, whether a school shelter is accessible and who has keys).

On infrastructure data, Michael said the county already stores fire-hydrant locations in GIS but that hydrant-pressure or "health" information would not be shown in the public-facing app; such operational layers would remain in internal/admin interfaces for responders. Michael also demonstrated that the admin side can return quick counts of buildings in a drawn area and report assessed-value data (he noted a demo display error that showed 0 for assessed value in one example).

Next steps: Michael agreed to circulate the concept and demo to partner agencies that missed the workshop so they can review zone boundaries in their districts; staff will continue refining zone granularity, add administrative datasets as appropriate, and define an approval process before maps are publicly published. No formal votes or motions were taken at the workshop.

Quotes used in this article are attributed to the speakers who appear in the meeting transcript and follow the meeting transcript's labels: Michael (GIS director), the meeting chair, an agency official, and Kevin Bennett, who spoke identifying himself as "with IOEM."