{"id":422072,"date":"2021-04-14T07:22:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-14T14:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=blog&#038;p=422072"},"modified":"2022-03-28T15:57:07","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T22:57:07","slug":"great-2019-flood-student-mappers","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/great-2019-flood-student-mappers","title":{"rendered":"How Technology and GIS Students Aided Response to the Great Flood of 2019"},"author":941,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[211],"tags":[141,30072,8012,1691],"industry":[],"esri-blog-category":[478642],"esri_blog_department":[478242],"class_list":["post-422072","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-public-safety","tag-drones","tag-emergency-response","tag-flooding","tag-situational-awareness","esri-blog-category-disaster-response","esri_blog_department-public-safety"],"acf":{"video_source":"","video_start":"","video_stop":"","short_description":"Students from Western Illinois University gained hands-on experiences using GIS technologies to monitor and respond to record flooding in 2019.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Right","content":"GIS, and students fluent with the tools, aided the response to record flooding in Illinois in 2019.\r\n\r\nKey Takeaways\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>A dashboard kept all responders and officials aware of the current flooding status.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Students flew drones to map and model levee weaknesses.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>The predictive capability of GIS technology helped temper the impact of flooding.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>","snippet":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"It's called the Great Flood of 2019 for good reason. It was the wettest spring on US record, impacting 14 million people as multiple storms hit and rivers overflowed, flooding the Midwest, High Plains, and South from January through June. New high water mark records were set in 42 different locations along the Mississippi River. The lessons learned then continue to this day\u2014the flood was one for the record books across many areas of science.\r\n\r\nStudents at Western Illinois University (WIU) in Macomb had a front-row seat\u2014Macomb sits between the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers and north of where the rivers meet\u2014and they set to work monitoring impacts and identifying areas of need."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":422162,"image_position":"right","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"\u201cThe Mississippi River was having extreme flooding, and the Illinois River just couldn\u2019t drain,\u201d said Chad Sperry, director of the GIS Center at WIU and a member of the state incident management team.\r\n\r\nSperry was dispatched by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA) to the State Unified Area Command (SUAC) in Winchester. He brought a team of geographic information system (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.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere were a lot of road closures, so the students were involved in making detour route maps and other mapping products,\u201d Sperry said. \u201cWe used drones to provide a real-time situational awareness capability. We were working 14-hour days for 16 days straight.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn many of the small communities along the rivers, flooding is a regular occurrence, 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.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe duration and the intense months of coping with flood response were exhausting,\u201d Sperry said.\r\n<h3><strong>Providing a View of an Important Levee<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nIn the state\u2019s unincorporated community of Nutwood, Sperry and his team monitored the main stem levee system a few miles away from town.\r\n\r\n\u201cNutwood isn\u2019t significant in terms of population, but very significant in terms of impact,\u201d Sperry said. \u201cIt sits right at the bluff, so it\u2019s 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.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe townspeople built their own back-up 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. And it took weeks for the waters to recede.\r\n\r\nSperry and his team were there over the course of the levee failure.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe mapped Nutwood using drones and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/arcgis\/products\/arcgis-drone2map\/overview\">Drone2Map<\/a> technology before the levee breach, during the levee breach, and after,\u201d Sperry said. \u201cDetailed drone mapping and elevation models were used by IEMA to inform evacuations.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe team also used GIS tools to record the aftermath. They used <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/arcgis\/products\/arcgis-survey123\/overview\">ArcGIS Survey123<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/arcgis\/products\/arcgis-collector\/overview\">ArcGIS Collector<\/a> to do post-flood damage assessments, photographing everything. Collecting data on iPads, the team moved away from the paper-based system historically used up and down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers.\r\n\r\nSperry helped train everyone and keep them on task. In some cases, this required guiding people through the discomfort of new work processes.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen you have folks used to writing everything down on paper, the first little hiccup makes them want to ditch the iPad,\u201d Sperry said. \u201cWe heard some of that. But when we got to lunch and hooked up all the iPads to a hotspot 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.\u201d\r\n<h3><strong>Keeping Rural Communities Mobile<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nThe work to map transportation routes was one of the more critical elements, with floods closing many roads and bridges, and people needing to evacuate.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe Department of Transportation had an expert traffic flow modeler that was optimizing evacuation routes,\u201d Sperry said. \u201cWe 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.\u201d\r\n\r\nMany 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 \u00a0even used their own boats to make the crossing, parking their cars across the river to avoid having to spend three additional hours each way driving around the flooding."},{"acf_fc_layout":"gallery","gallery_images":[422112,422132,422142,422312]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"As the high water moved downriver over time, the team did some inundation modeling to help understand impacts as flooding neared St. Louis.\r\n\r\n\u201cThere were some questions that if a particular levee breaks, what would we be looking at?\u201d Sperry said. \u201cWe were creating flood extent maps to examine the realities if any one of these levees breached.\u201d\r\n\r\nIncident commanders and planning section chiefs studied the flood extent maps to create contingency plans. By looking at potential outcomes, they could determine which homes and roads would be impacted and prioritize evacuation areas should the levees fail.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe used something like one million sandbags during the event,\u201d Sperry said. \u201cLevees are typically built with an earthen core with sand over the top of it. Over time, the sand and core get saturated, and that puts pressure and stress on the surrounding soils. We had boils popping up a half mile inside the levee where the river found a path, and they would put sandbags around those to equalize them with the height of the river.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe US Army Corps of Engineers used ArcGIS Collector to mark and monitor the boils, any depressions in the levee, and anything out of the ordinary. That data about weak spots will then be used to inform future levee improvements.\r\n<h3><strong>One View for the Team of Teams<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nThe real-time data collected by different agencies and GIS students was fed into <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/arcgis\/products\/arcgis-dashboards\/overview\">ArcGIS Dashboards<\/a> and shared across the state.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe built a dashboard with the National Guard to show where sandbag troops were being deployed,\u201d Sperry said. \u201cAfter that first briefing where we used the dashboard, they moved us into the main building and the dashboard stayed up on the main screen.\u201d\r\n\r\nSoon the dashboard was shared with the Emergency Operations Center in Springfield, and the National Weather Service in Chicago used it to see what\u2019s really going on from a levee status standpoint. It was used to brief the governor, department heads, state senators, and US senators."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":422102,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/app\/uploads\/2021\/03\/SpringFlood-Dashboard.jpg"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Eventually, the dashboard aggregated and consolidated data from 10 to 15 GIS analysts working for various agencies. WIU students worked alongside the experts. Pam Brooks, GIS specialist at IEMA, had already fostered relationships with GIS people from other agencies and was able to help coordinate the collaboration.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhether there\u2019s a need for specific map elements to be created or various datasets to be updated, we all chip in,\u201d Sperry said.\r\n\r\nAt daily morning briefings, the teams discussed any status changes on the dashboard. For instance, the representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers would inform the group of any levee breeches or overtops, or levees in a state of caution.\r\n\r\nThe students kept track of details such as shelter locations because sometimes shelters would have to move if a levee failed. Keeping that information up-to-date was crucial to making sure evacuees had somewhere to go.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe would get requests to add something, such as weather overlays for radar, and the students would research and find the best live data to add to the dashboard,\u201d Sperry said. \u201cThere were many hands-on opportunities.\u201d\r\n<h3><strong>Lifelong Lessons Learned<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nThe students gained a tremendous learning experience from these events, with immersion in the use of a wide variety of GIS tools and the need to deliver answers quickly during a crisis.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe got a call one night just as we were getting ready to go home for the evening that a levee had just overtopped,\u201d Sperry said. \u201cSo everybody just set their bags down and dug back in again. We were there for a couple more hours that evening.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe flood events gave students crucial practice in the fast-paced, high-stakes world of emergency response using GIS\u2014a common and important application of the technology.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was definitely the most stressful work environment I've ever had to work in,\u201d said Ian Stearns, a WIU student majoring in meteorology who helped out. \u201cBeing able to learn how to control the stress of all the things going on, all the decisions you have to make, has been really helpful for me.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":422122,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"At the time he joined the student team to respond to the disaster, Stearns had taken one GIS class and was working at the GIS Center for three months in a paid position that gives students real-world experience.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen we flew over the temporary levee in Nutwood to identify places it might fail, that was really fascinating,\u201d Stearns said. \u201cThe way we were able to create a detailed digital elevation model from the imagery\u2014and Chad Sperry was able to model water height in relation to it and other buildings\u2014was awesome. I had never even thought of that kind of application of GIS.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn between events, the students would talk about GIS jobs and get to know the emergency personnel. The students\u2019 real-time skills made an impression on their professional cohorts.\r\n\r\n\u201cOne of our grad students had two different job offers from the US Army Corps of Engineers before he even got home,\u201d Sperry said.\r\n\r\nToday, in Stearns' meteorology classes, he said students talk about the accumulated snowfall, and how the ground was still frozen when the snow was melting so there was no intake of moisture in the soil, and then there were above-average spring showers. So all those factors contributed to why this event was so historic.\r\n\r\nThough the flood of 2019 set many new records\u2014longer in duration with higher floodwaters\u2014Sperry said the damages were less than what was anticipated.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe had eyes in the sky and the ability to predict and not just react. Instead of waking up to find that a levee broke in the night, we deployed sandbagging efforts to where GIS predicted it would break. We knew what was coming with the rainfall models and the gauge models. And so technology was really given a lot of credit for minimizing the impacts.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Center","content":"<h2><strong>Flood Modeling Introduces a New Flood Awareness<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nData derived from light detection and ranging (lidar) sensors offers new opportunities to observe and model flooding at varying scales, with vertical accuracy measured in centimeters compared to meters from previous elevation sources. Data returns are used to create high-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs), which can then be used to derive flood extents and inundation maps in a GIS.\r\n\r\n\u201cBeing able to show the difference of just six inches of water answers a lot of questions,\u201d said Chad Sperry, director of the GIS Center at Western Illinois University. \u201cIt really shows the impacts, such as how many more homes are going to be inundated.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe science and engineering about water behavior\u2014where it\u2019s coming from and where it\u2019s going\u2014are built into Esri\u2019s Arc Hydro technology. This toolset models both hydrology (extrapolating runoff amounts based on rainfall amounts) and hydraulics (the movement of liquids).\r\n\r\nWith hydrologic modeling in GIS, we can know what is flooded or where it\u2019s flooded. This knowledge can stream to dashboards, be applied in models for impact assessments, and feed into routing tools that automatically dispatch and route emergency vehicles around areas likely inundated.\r\n\r\nThere are more than 300 tools in Arc Hydro along with workflows for integrated analysis. The webinar series, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/lg\/industry\/water\/water-resources-arc-hydro-in-action\">Arc Hydro in Action<\/a>, shows how people can use GIS to understand and proactively respond to the movement of water.","snippet":""}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How Technology and GIS Students Aided Response to the Great Flood of 2019<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Students from Western Illinois University gained hands-on experiences using GIS technologies to respond to The Great Flood of 2019.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/great-2019-flood-student-mappers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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He helps organizations deploy GIS to improve preparedness and leads the global Disaster Response Program, which provides GIS support during disasters. A former appointed member of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Advisory Council in the US, Lanclos currently serves on the International Advisory Board of Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) for Japan and the XPRIZE Wildfire Advisory Board. He has also served as Missouri\u2019s first geographic information officer (GIO), GIS advisor for the Governor\u2019s Homeland Security Advisory Council, and Director of State and Local Government at the National Alliance for Public Safety GIS (NAPSG) Foundation. 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