42 Everything starts with a map. The beauty of GIS is that it brings information together in a way that everybody can understand immediately: different data sources shown as layers on a map. Patterns in Public Works Requests Inform an Immediate Response LauderServ, the citizen response management platform for the city, allows residents to log service requests from a phone or computer. The GIS team has configured the system to serve data into ArcGIS Online, GIS software-as-a-service, displaying requests as a layer on the map. The thunderstorms had caused localized flooding. To identify the problem areas quickly, the public works department looked for clusters of reported sewer and flooding issues on the map. Then the department sent pump trucks to vacuum standing water in these places. Looking at service requests also provided a starting point for the fire department’s windshield assessment—a preliminary damage survey that’s conducted from a moving vehicle— which staff would use to plan recovery operations. Firefighters recorded levels of damage using a GIS application on mobile devices for data collection. Results of the windshield assessment were pulled into GIS as a color-coded map layer that guided the work. “We gave public works staff the ability to say, OK, the flooding is less severe now, so let’s mark that area as yellow, or let’s mark that area as orange,” Hogan said. “It was telling us where we needed to still go, and what areas we needed to concentrate on,” Lucas explained. Building a Custom Map Layer for State-Level Decision-Makers To declare a state of emergency requires photo evidence of at least 500 dwellings that have sustained major storm damage. For a municipal government working alone in a time crunch, collecting, and sharing this information was a daunting task. But the deputy chief had an idea. Having previously worked with the State Emergency Response Team (SERT) assessing hurricane damage to fire stations in the Florida Panhandle, Lucas knew ArcGIS Survey123 could speed up the process. “If we’re going to the moon, someone has to be smart enough to build the rocket. Fortunately, I have the best GIS team in the world to make that task easy.” — Jeff Lucas, deputy fire chief, City of Fort Lauderdale The fire inspections team learned the new Survey123 app in about an hour.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjA2NTE0Mw==