WardZone Mapping 

In various areas of the church we have been asked to divide our Ward areas into manageable sections of real estate for emergency preparedness. For none members, of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day saints, Wards are set up in towns and cities where there are up to around 500 members. In smaller towns there is often only one building with a chapel. In larger towns there may be enough members for two wards who share one building, usually mornings and afternoons on Sundays. As you get into larger cities you get more Wards and more buildings. If you have enough wards (4 or 5) you generally get a Stake building which will contain one or two wards plus have facilities for various events. Many of the building structures of the church are rated as collection points for people if their homes have been damaged and unliveable (disaster scenario). Strength of construction is very important to church architects.

Getting back to the zones: I was asked to create zone maps. I searched several places in Canada and the US to see how others may have managed the task but found nothing of real help. It was do-it-myself-time. I took stock of what I had and analyzed what I could do with it. I had these items and had a reasonable knowledge of how to use them:

(1)    An Epson flat bed page scanner (now I have a Canon 8800F, another flat bed scanner I like even better, it's faster)

(2)    A digital camera

(3)    MS Office with MS Word and MS Excel

(4)    IrfanView - http://www.irfanview.com/

(5)   Click Book  - http://www.bluesquirrel.com/products/clickbook/

(6)   A good road map of the city and surrounding area

(7)   Some black peel and stick numbers about 1/2" high

(8)   Piece of 1/4" thick hardboard to mount the map on so that it would be a flat surface

(9)   Roll of 1/16" wide black tape to mark boundaries of zones on the map

I went out and purchased a good street map, then went to a drafting/art supply store and got some narrow black tape and some stick on black numbers about 1cm high, and bought a piece of hardboard about 4’ X 4’. I mounted the map on the hard board, used the tape to divide it up into zones, and put the numbers on the zones in places where they would not obscure important information. 

I set the map up in a location where I could get even light (outside) and photographed it with my digital camera. I then used some software called “IrfanView” to crop the image and get rid of extra material I did not want. I started up MS Word to create a document in portrait format, created a heading describing what came next. I then inserted the map image as a reference.

Next, I scanned the various zones with the flat bed scanner. The scanner provided much better resolution of street names and details not possible to easily capture with the camera (not that it could not be done but I did not have good results in my attempts). Once again I used the IrfanView program to crop the images and adjust the brightness and contrast.

I created more pages in the booklet already started and each zone has a map image on it followed by pages of lists of member names, addresses, phones, and who the 2 zone leaders are for that zone. I chose two leaders for redundancy’s sake. In a disaster one of the leaders may be unable to help because he/she may be one in need of help. On the zone map image page the actual map only takes about a half of the page and placed in the middle. The balance of the page around the image consists of blocks of information (Name, address) in what Microsoft calls pull out boxes.

If you aren’t aware of pull-out boxes you’re not alone. Click on “View” on MS Word to the right of “File” and “Edit”. In the drop-down box select “Drawing”. When that tool bar appears you will see an area on it called “Autoshapes.” Click on that and you will see a selection called callouts. Callouts are something like text boxes but with pointers. The version I used was called a line callout but it’s up to the user. I used the pullout handles to point to where members lived on the maps.

After completing all the pages of maps and lists I used a program called Click Book to turn the package into a booklet. If You can imagine an 8 ½” X 11” page turned on it’s side in sort of a landscape mode but with two vertical pages on it, each in portrait mode you have a good idea what it would look like. Everything is scaled down, text and images. Then think of pages on the back of it so one sheet of paper has 4 pages on it. That’s what Click Book did for me plus keep track of where pages were so that when the pages were stapled through the middle it made a nice booklet with the pages in proper order. We handed out ours when we handed out ward telephone books.

I won’t lie, it was a lot of work to identify where all church members were located and then they have the terrible habit of moving around the area or moving out altogether so the task is ongoing. I live in a city with a couple of Universities and a college so change is constant. 

I recommend this method for laying out zone maps for cities. I have an example of the Zone Map index page, zone map, and list in both MSWord format and in PDF format. Just click on the highlighted words. If you wanted to use my format and you have a newer version of MS Word then all you need to do is delete the graphic map images (I used JPG formats) and insert your own. I’m hoping that I have given you enough information so that you can figure out what I did and launch your own zone maps.