The Public Works Department is streamlining its disaster recovery planning by populating a GIS database with cost estimates for infrastructure and buildings in the town, prescripting 90 percent of required cleanup actions, automating information sharing, and pushing that information to repair crews in the field, emergency managers, elected officials and the public.
Currently the department’s employees begin cleaning up debris following a hurricane. The new Infrastructure Branch Plan would shift the cleanup work to contractors dispatched by department employees. Under the new plan, procedures would be in place to fill equipment trailers with spare tires and emergency supply kits for the various tasks, and upon completion of a project, crews would be routed by a dispatcher to the nearest high-priority project. “They don’t have to come back,” Diez said, “because we’re electronically transferring work orders to them, and they are going from facility to facility to facility completely electronically, doing the emergency repairs with the materials they have on hand.”
The Mobile Damage Assessment Resource Tool application is based on Esri technology that was built by the Geographic Technologies Group in cooperation with the town. Diez said it was difficult to put a price tag on the system because much of the work was done by town employees and contractors who volunteered their time.
Driven by Technology
As damage assessment teams make their rounds, one person will take photographs of structures — the pictures will automatically embed location and compass orientation information in them. The other member of the team then looks at the photos and assigns them a score that will determine the structure’s color on the GIS map — green represents normal; blue, minor damage; orange, major damage; and red, destroyed.
The spreadsheet will then be part of a color-coded GIS map of the city, showing the condition of its sections, which will change as repairs are completed. “Over time what you’re going to see is you know a week later some of those [red sections] might turn to orange; some of those blues might go green,” Diez said. “So you’re always going to able to keep your finger on the pulse of the town as far as its relative health.”
The map will also indicate where debris collection crews are working, including time stamps. When the cleanup crew selects the street on the map, it changes color indicating work in progress and then again to show that work has been completed. At the end of each day, the debris collection reports will be input into the system.
Information Sharing
The GIS map then becomes a place to share information with the various groups in the town from first responders and work crews, to incident command staff and elected officials, to the public. “It will also, we’re hoping, reduce the number of calls that come into the [Emergency Operations Center] to only those calls that are important. In other words, the 10 percent — those calls that are out of the ordinary,” Diez said. “They won’t feel compelled to call if they know we’re on it, if they know they can look in the GIS system and actually tell where we are working right now.”
The system is also expected to allow the Public Works Department to schedule jobs and predict how long debris removal will take. “If we’ve estimated that we have 100,000 cubic yards of debris on the ground, and because we’re getting very detailed collection information and we’re picking up 10,000 cubic yards a day, we’re going to be done in 10 days,” Diez said.
He also hopes the electronic workflow will speed up the receipt of disaster assistance from FEMA and increase the accuracy of documentation.
The town’s Fire Rescue Department hosted a tabletop exercise with other departments on Oct. 25, where Diez said the plan was well received. “They saw the potential for it,” he said, “and in a couple of cases I was able to tell them, ‘Look at the GIS and you’ll get the information you’re looking for.’”
Diez plans to hold additional tabletop exercises before the start of the 2011 hurricane season, when he plans to organize a functional exercise using the Infrastructure Branch Plan and technology platform.
