Defining your jurisdiction as a boundary

A jurisdiction is a boundary, not a circle. A county emergency manager is responsible for the county — every facility, every road, every resident inside a line drawn on a map decades ago — and the Jurisdiction Dashboard counts what is inside that line.

Adding the boundary

Under Monitored Areas, pick the kind of place: a county, a city or town (an incorporated place, or a Census Designated Place for unincorporated communities), a tribal area (American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian areas as the Census draws them), or a state. Type the name and Calchis fetches the 2020 Census TIGER boundary. A drawn polygon works too, when your area of responsibility does not match any of those.

The boundary is stored simplified to a few meters’ tolerance so the map and the counts stay fast. It is the same line the Census uses, which is a defensible answer to “why is that facility counted and not this one.”

Using it on the dashboard

On the Jurisdiction Dashboard choose Saved boundary and pick the area. Active events, critical-infrastructure counts and the briefing PDF are then scoped to what falls strictly inside the polygon — not within some radius of its center. Point + radius is still there for a quick look at somewhere you have not saved.

Concurrent events

When two or more events are active inside the boundary, the dashboard adds Concurrent events — taken together: each event’s zone-1 population, structures and hospitals (the same figures its own page shows), the incidents drawing on it, and any pair the compound detector flags — with the amplification, its confidence, and whether the rule behind it has been validated. The summed line is a ceiling, not a headcount: zones overlap where events do, and it says so. An event whose figures could not be read shows a dash and is counted as a floor; a failed combined read says it failed rather than showing nothing.

What is still a point

The hazard profile is scored at one point, and the dashboard says which: the Census interior point of the boundary, or the center of a circle. Hazard exposure is not uniform across a county — the floodplain is where the river is — so read the profile as “the hazard at the seat,” not an average. The briefing PDF states the scored point in its header.

Areas marked approximate

Areas added before boundaries came from the Census are squares drawn around a geocoded center. They are labeled approximate and still work for alerts, but a square is not a county. Delete and re-add the area to get the real boundary.

Availability

County, city and tribal boundaries unlock with Analyst; the Jurisdiction Dashboard is an Agency capability — see pricing.