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Florida’s Pinellas County is in a
part of the world bedeviled by water worries. Water has either
drenched Pinellas without mercy or vanished entirely. For most
of this century the county, like much of South Florida,
battled floods that swamped its highways and eroded its sandy
soils. Hurricanes pounded its shores, forcing tens of
thousands to flee inland.
And now, in a perverse shift,
years of drought have parched the county, pushing its water
tables ever lower. Some residents are almost nostalgic for the
torrential rains. But they’ll be back.
Hydrology and stormwater control
are a major concern for local government engineers everywhere,
and especially in Pinellas County. While it is Florida’s
third-smallest county, Pinellas is a peninsula bounded by the
Gulf of Mexico on one side and Tampa Bay on the other, with
588 miles of vulnerable coastline and a high population
density of 3,290 people per square mile. To stay ahead of the
rains – when they choose to return – the county has mapped out
the contours of almost every inch of its terrain to predict
which areas are likeliest to flood. And when roads and park
facilities are built, engineers at the Department of Public
Works use a series of Autodesk products to manipulate land
maps, design structures, produce 3-D models, collaborate on
projects, and bid jobs out to contractors.
Early Forays
into GIS Pinellas
County had a head start on applying new technologies to its
challenges because of its early commitment to Geographic
Information Systems (GIS). Since 1986, the county has steadily
cultivated a huge graphic database of digitized maps, aerial
photographs, geodetic survey points and other data that has
touched almost every area of county government.
Information that is usually
scattered across different paper sources and computer records
has been unified into one repository with many layers.
Agencies throughout Pinellas are using the GIS database to
view information like property parcel boundaries, fire
districts, school zones, census tracts, voting and other
political districts, hurricane evacuation zones, drainage
districts, street names, homeowners associations and ZIP code
lines.
Pinellas County first
implemented a Vision database – an Oracle-driven, map-based
enterprise system later acquired by Autodesk – at a time when
only four other jurisdictions in the United States had one.
The county developed a centralized GIS called Enforcer, which
allows police officers to track sexual predators or view
concentrations of recent crime activity through Web-based maps
that run on Autodesk MapGuide. The system is used by deputies
in the Sheriff’s Office and officers at 12 municipal police
departments. That Enforcer application, easily used by
officers who have little specialized computer training, has
attracted attention from police departments across the country
-- many of which have now installed similar systems.
Most recently, the county was
once again among the first in the nation to adopt ProjectPoint
(formerly Buzzsaw), Autodesk’s online project collaboration
service. The system allows Pinellas project managers,
engineers and outside contractors to communicate and exchange
materials, such as project plans, over a secure Web site. The
county is experimenting with the platform for three pilot
projects.
Managing
Storms At the
Department of Public Works, which builds and maintains about
half the county’s roads as well as park facilities, drainage
systems and beach renourishment projects, more than 50
employees use Autodesk’s Land Development product suite – Land
Desktop, Civil Design and Survey – as a design tool. Among
their main tasks is controlling how any new road, parking lot
or other structure will affect the flow of stormwater in the
downpours that historically have inundated the county.
Larry Solien, the department’s
Engineering Applications Manager, said teams of government
surveyors (or private contractors) collect point data at a job
site to compile an electronic “field book.” That data is
downloaded into Land Desktop 2i, where survey CADD technicians
create a drawing file that reflects existing features on the
site such as the road’s centerline, topography and surrounding
utility lines. The surface point data is then converted into a
triangular irregular network (TIN), a 3-D model that depicts
surfaces as a mesh of triangular faces. When technicians add
“intelligent” ARX drawing objects showing slopes and contours,
the result is a complete 3-D image of the project area that
will serve as the basis for construction plans.
The Southwest Florida Water
Management District – a state agency whose acronym, SWFWMD, is
colloquially called “Swiftmud” – issues permits for
construction of any new road in Pinellas. The permits mandate
that any water discharge from the road must be preserved at
current levels. The county is thus required to determine what
water collection rates are “normal” and build drainage ponds
near the road to keep those levels there, preventing erosion.
(In drought years like this one, establishing a normal level
can be difficult, as water simply does not accumulate.) The
ponds are tracked in a county database, “so we don’t forget
what we built and what we have to maintain,” said Steve Burke,
P.E., and engineering project manager at Public Works.
When roads need drainage grates
that feed into sewer systems, engineers first do a “soft dig”
to map out all the existing underground utilities, such as
gas, water and phone lines. “We want to build 3-D pipe
diagrams so we can identify conflicts as we’re assembling the
design,” said Solien. “We put all the surveyors’ utility
positions into the Pipeworks module in LDT [Land Development
Desktop], and when we look at the resulting 3-D image, we can
see how everything is in the real world: can we really put
that 60-inch reinforced concrete pipe on the side of the
road?” Burke said the LDT
products have made it easier for the agency to do utility
work, “repetitive work” and modifications of existing
projects. “The roadway cross-sections and especially the
grading tools are helpful with earthwork,” he said. “You can
identify a surface area, then draw a second proposed surface
based on an elevation, and the software will tell you how much
material is necessary to be removed or added based on that
slope.”
Airborne Lasers!
Adding to Pinellas’ rich
storehouse of GIS data is an extraordinarily detailed, 3-D
model that shows almost every surface contour of the county’s
land mass. The system, originally developed by NASA and
applied in this case by the University of Florida, is called
LIDAR (light detection and ranging). A device fastened to the
bottom of an airplane beamed lasers at the ground
continuously, measuring the distance to every surface they
struck. A differential GPS (global positioning system) gave a
precise position for each ground feature to the aircraft.
Computer algorithms then filtered out objects such as
buildings, trees and lightposts, eventually leaving a digital
terrain model that is accurate to two-tenths of a foot.
The data helped Pinellas save
hundreds of thousands of dollars that the county otherwise
might have had to spend on traditional survey methods, and
gave its engineers a detailed picture of the shape of the
county’s coastal areas. “We import that contour information
into LDT and it shows us the limits of the drainage basins,
the way beaches look, which areas will flood first,” said
Solien. “Then we superimpose our GIS parcel database on top,
and it gives us a good idea of a preliminary design for
hydrology.” Engineers and CADD technicians import the model
into AutoCAD as a DXF file.
The county has given the LIDAR
contour data to various municipalities, and ultimately plans
to make it available to the public on a Web site. “Among other
uses, the model can show you what areas should be evacuated
first in a hurricane,” Solien said. “It has given us a head
start.”
Three ProjectPoint
Pilots Solien said
the county’s experiment with ProjectPoint, an online project
management service, is being done with three pilot projects –
each of which will highlight a different phase of design and
construction. One involves extending a large arterial road,
already in construction, in which field inspectors and several
departments will keep each other updated through the central
ProjectPoint platform. A second project is about 70 percent
designed; in Phase II of the pilot the county will send out
requests for construction bids online through ProjectPoint,
asking potential contractors to log on to the project site
with a password and download AutoCAD design plans from it,
instead of the paper plans that were costing the county an
estimated $10,000 a month to print and mail out.
The third project is just in the
preliminary phase of design. An external consultant will use
the site to post comments back and forth with the county’s
project managers as the design plans evolve, using
ProjectPoint’s internal e-mail and document functions. “The
service’s document version tracking feature is important to us
because as a government agency, we have to provide an audit
trail,” Solien said. “If I make changes to a drawing and post
it back up on the site, it goes up as ‘version 2.’ ”
“The biggest issue with this is
the human factor – getting people to change the way they work,
not using the postal mail or internal e-mail,” Solien said.
“It’s a change, but eventually the light bulb goes on and you
get that ‘wow!’ when people realize they can access their
project from anywhere they have an Internet connection.”
The experiment seems fitting for a
county that has so often led the way by solving problems with
map- and design-based technology. “A lot of people are
watching us to see what kind of success we have before they
get on board,” Solien said. “That’s OK. We don’t mind being
first.”
The Pinellas County Department of
Public Works’ Autodesk solutions were sold and implemented by
Avatech of Florida. For more information about Avatech, visit
www.avatech.com or phone 800-706-1000. For information on
ProjectPoint and other online management services, visit
www.buzzsaw.com This
case study was prepared by DLT Solutions, Inc. of Herndon,
Virginia, Autodesk’s master government sales and marketing
partner. DLT and Authorized Autodesk Resellers deliver the
complete family of Autodesk and companion products to federal,
state and local government agencies nationwide. For a free
demo CD, call 1-888-223-7084 or visit
www.dlt.com/autodesk. GSA schedule # GS-35F-4543G.
For questions on this study please
contact:
Will Heyniger
The SheaHedges Group
McLean, VA
703-287-7809
wheyniger@sheahedges.com
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Pinellas County
Leads the Way Again With Land Desktop & ProjectPoint