During the early part of our clean-up efforts from Hurricane Sandy we realized the enormity of the event with regard to the amount of storm debris. The Town of Huntington Highway Department had removed 70,000 cubic yards of vegetative debris during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. We are now faced with up to 4 times that with Hurricane Sandy.
We needed an easy way to get information to our residents and we needed this information to be publicly available. We had an url registered from years ago so we put it to use.
We set up a website with storm debris information and most importantly a map showing where we have cleaned up already.
We advertised the site by email and local press.
The feature class is edited every other day in ArcGIS 10.1 and then directly uploaded to ArcGIS Online. We print paper maps for each foreman and have them highlight what they have done the previous two days (paper maps don’t need to be recharged and they do not break when dropped and no training is required to use them). We get these paper maps back from the field and update the map.
ESRI has donated the services as they do whenever there is a disaster. ESRI also provided technical support that was needed to get everything up and running smoothly.
Submitted by:
Michael Naughton
Town of Huntington Highway Department
