Mapping the Labyrinth Beneath the City

When a sinkhole swallowed a section of street in downtown Baltimore in Fall 1998, spectators and television crews got a spectacular glimpse of the complex network of public utilities beneath the City. Crews from the City of Baltimore Department of Public Works (DPW) responded quickly to contain the damage, even though their file drawings painted an incomplete picture of what lay beneath the rubble.

The lack of comprehensive data during the incident underscored the importance of a new City program, already under way, to develop a Geographic Information System (GIS) for identifying and mapping public utilities. Weeks before, DPW had selected KCI Technologies, Inc., to create a database for the stormdrain and sanitary sewer portion of its innovative, $20 million initiative.

The Program—Working under a fast-track, one-year contract , KCI submitted more than 2,000 individual 40-scale maps, detailing 1,159 miles of stormdrains and 2,227 miles of sanitary sewers. The project team collected and stored the data using GIS technology.

“What makes this project so special,” according to KCI President and CEO Terry F. Neimeyer, PE, “is that the City of Baltimore now has a wealth of information available at its fingertips—data that is not only helpful on a day-to-day management basis, but could be crucial in an emergency. For instance, if you have a sinkhole open or a water main break or a utility line rupture, engineers would be able to access intricate data on all the adjacent features on the site and formulate a rapid solution to the problem.”

KCI Project Manager and Senior Vice President Nathan J. Beil, PE, explained the project’s complexity. “We had people working in shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week to scan and inventory more than 43,000 documents in less than four weeks right in DPW’s offices. Because we performed this phase on site, we allowed City workers uninterrupted access to data and satisfied the City’s concerns for security. Our approach also enabled us to complete this phase in one-third of the allotted time and significantly under budget.”

Record Conversion & Data Storage—The City maintains more than 50,000 stormdrain and sewer documents, some of which date from the 1800s and all varying in readability and accuracy. Early in the project, KCI crews walked every City block to confirm the locations of stormwater and sanitary sewer surface features. Using a dedicated NT server and 18 GIS workstations to meet the project’s computer data storage requirements, the project team digitized the features, created new plots, and compared them to the City’s official record plat. KCI then transferred data from the plats into a customized Microsoft Access database and created an ARC/INFO-GIS plot showing the digitized information and text attributes from the database—all in keeping with the City’s drafting standards. In seven months, the GIS staff entered more than one-half million database entries, including 51,801 stormwater inlets and 70,622 manholes.

“We completed the work by January 1, 1999—a little more than one year after signing the contract,” Beil said. “KCI’s approach to managing the .6 million project proved so successful that other engineering firms adopted the methodology. And, perhaps most important to the citizens of Baltimore, we completed the project on schedule and under budget. Of course, we couldn’t have done the job without the leadership of Amar Sokhey and Gary Wyatt at the City. DPW’s vision made the project a success.”

Awards—On February 24th, the Consulting Engineers Council of Maryland presented KCI with its 2000 Award of Merit for Engineering Excellence. The American Consulting Engineers Council later awarded the project finalist status in its 2000 Engineering Excellence Awards Competition.

More on GIS

Hunt Valley—In the coming weeks, KCI will continue work on the City of Baltimore’s GIS mapping project, providing unique services under three separate contracts.

Aerial Photogrammetry—KCI will use aerial photographs to update the City’s topography, identifying the precise location of buildings, manholes, and a host of other features on digitally enhanced planimetrics.

Conduit Inspection—Under a one-year contract, experienced crews from KCI’s Public Utilities Division will inspect manholes, cables, and conduit routing facilities in the City. KCI will incorporate data from the physical assessment in the City’s existing GIS database.

Conduit Automation—KCI will create a database program to link new conduit data to the GIS database, providing the City with a comprehensive view of its massive underground network.


 



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