Truckee Donner

Truckee Donner Public Utility District, Truckee, California—Truckee Donner Public Utility District (TDPUD) is a small utility with 13,500 electric customers, 15,000 water customers, and supporting telecommunications. Truckee Donner is located in California's Sierra Mountains, not far from Lake Tahoe, where just two seasons impact the utility company: the winter season and the construction season. These two seasons are bipolar, lasting approximately six months each.

To keep costs down, Truckee Donner performs its own data conversion and customization and uses ArcFM out of the box. Using GPS as a data entry foundation, TDPUD creates parcel basemaps that are used both by the company and by the town. It also makes use of the 3D TIN environment and slope analysis for contour generation. It employs Survey Analyst for parcel information and conjoining properties. Data testing is in Tadpole Cartesian and conic GIS for field units.

The average annual snowfall is 400 inches, but the community can receive as much as 900 inches. The snow buries the facilities for half the year. During this time, the GIS is needed to locate the facilities and provide navigation to them. Most facilities management in the winter season is restricted to maintenance activity.

Depending on weather patterns, the construction season starts about mid-May. During the winter, the ground is permafrost, so as soon as spring arrives, everyone begins digging at the same time. Business starts happening fast, and the utility company's GIS is actively coordinating efforts. It locates joint projects and trenching projects. This also is the season when outages suddenly occur because of cut cables.

The company matches its maintenance and facilities development schedule with other construction agencies like Caltrans, California's road maintenance agency. If Caltrans is widening a highway, the utility company uses its GPS/GIS to maintain its facilities or plan new projects during the same time.

ArcFM has also been effective in supporting the company's conduit system management project.

Prior to implementing the company's GIS, the majority of the knowledge about facility location existed in the field crews' walking maps. Some of these maps were 30 to 40 years old. Thus, newer field crews had insufficient reference tools. The GIS they initiated has its field functions for handling the two-season business of the company, and it has its design side. The design side services the customer information system (CIS) that issues e-mails and letters to customers and notifications to those living in construction areas. The ArcFM outage management solution is used to tie transformer numbers with customers' locations, then input this data into the geodatabase for the CIS.

The 3D Analyst capabilities of the GIS have also been useful in keeping GIS costs down. Using the GPS coordinator, the system can display a nongenerated digital elevation model (DEM) with one-foot contours. This model is incorporated into engineering drawings by coordinating engineering designs to DEM contours. The integration makes contouring accurate enough for designers. These drawings are rebuilt into TIN coverages displaying the data at one-foot intervals. This level of exactness is what is necessary for engineering design. The costs of this process are less than the costs associated with flying and producing photogrammetric planimetric work. It also reduces the time frame of information turnaround from two months to just one week. Although the results are a little less accurate than the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) DEM, the discrepancy is insignificant for the utility's design process.