Page 89 - Mapping the Nation: Taking Climate Action

Sperry was dispatched by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA) to the State Unified Area Command (SUAC) in Winchester. He brought a team of GIS students to create maps that could help first responders from IEMA, the National Guard, Illinois Department of Transportation, Illinois State Police, US Army Corps of Engineers, and others. "There were a lot of road closures, so the students were involved in making detour route maps and other mapping products," Sperry said. "We used drones to provide a real-time situational awareness capability. We were working 14-hour days for 16 days straight." In many of the small communities along the rivers, flooding occurs regularly, but not to the extent and duration of these events. Beardstown, Illinois, experienced 176 days of minor and moderate flooding. In nearby Havana, major flooding stretched for 37 days. Providing a View of an Important Levee In the state's unincorporated community of Nutwood, Sperry and his team monitored the main stem levee system a few miles away from town. "Nutwood isn't significant in terms of population but very significant in terms of impact," Sperry said. "It sits right at the bluff, so it's almost out of the floodplain, but not quite. It became evident that this levee was going to fail due to the models that were run by the US Army Corps of Engineers and the National Weather Service using hydraulic forecasts and GIS to do predictive modeling." The townspeople built their backup levee using bulldozers to push dirt from the farm fields around town. Unfortunately, the main levee failed and then the town levee failed. When the Nutwood Levee overtopped, it forced the closure of Illinois State Route 16 at the Joe Page Bridge near Hardin. The water took weeks to recede. Sperry's GIS team mapped Nutwood using drones and ArcGIS Drone2Map® technology before, during, and after the levee breach. Detailed drone mapping and elevation models were used by IEMA to inform evacuations. The team also used GIS tools to record the aftermath. They used Survey123 and ArcGIS Collector to assess and photograph flood damage. Collecting data on iPads, the team moved away from the paper-based system historically used up and down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. Sperry helped train everyone and keep them on task, despite occasional challenges. "When you have folks used to writing everything down on paper, the first little hiccup makes them want to ditch the iPad," Sperry said. "We heard some of that. But when we got to lunch and hooked up all the iPads to a hot spot and pushed data to the cloud so they could all see their work on the map, the light bulbs started going on. It was one of those aha moments for a lot of damage assessment crews that had never used this technology." Keeping Rural Communities Mobile The work to map transportation routes was one of the more critical elements, with floods closing many roads and bridges and people needing to evacuate. "The Department of Transportation had an expert traffic flow modeler that was optimizing evacuation routes," Sperry said. "We imported that information into geodatabases to take it to the next step, creating map products to provide the context of where all the people would ultimately end up." Many ferries run across the rivers due to a lack of bridge infrastructure, and road and bridge closures from the flooding made mobility even worse. Commuters to St. Louis even used their boats to make the crossing, parking 88 Inland Flooding