Established in 2013, the Utah Mapping Emergency Technical Team (UMETT) is a UGIC committee that recognizes the potential threats of natural and man-made disasters to our communities; understanding that geographic information is essential to an effective response and recovery. 
UMETT meets quarterly to share lessons learned from local GIS professionals who have supported emergencies around Utah, as well as discuss best practices from other organizations around the country. We have discussed essential data needs, useful tools and applications, symbology standards and map templates, and have conducted GIS related hands-on emergency drills at UGIC conferences.
Part of our mission is to establish a volunteer response team of skilled GIS professionals who can provide assistance with geospatial tools and technology to other jurisdictions who might be overwhelmed during an emergency. This volunteer response team is making exciting strides forward and we encourage anyone in our GIS community to get involved. The UMETT coordinating board is reaching out to the emergency management community to introduce this resource.
In order to ensure our response team members are well prepared to work in an emergency response environment, volunteers must complete some training requirements.
There will be a pre-conference training at the UGIC Conference in Park City on May 9th to introduce the Incident Command System, the basic command structure for emergency response, as well as details on how the UMETT response group will operate. The instructor-led course will cover ICS-100, 200, 700, and 800 in a single session and you will receive official FEMA completion certificates. For those of you working in government agencies, this training may already be required for you and this is an excellent opportunity to complete them all in a single day. You can register for the pre-conference training and the rest of the conference on UGIC’s Conference webpage, opens in a new tab.
If you would like to be on the UMETT mailing list for future meetings and other related announcements, please contact Talson Schulzke from Salt Lake County Emergency Management at TSchulzke@ufa-slco.org, or Kate Smith from the team at KateSmith8@gmail.com.