—Roger Cottrell, URS Corporation—North Carolina
Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Cherry Point, North Carolina is a 29,000-acre facility located in eastern North Carolina. Housing over 7,500 Marines and 5,700 civilian workers, this installation is equal in size to a small city. MCAS Cherry Point's electric, water, and wastewater utilities span the facility, and are critical to the installation's core mission. In order to serve its customer's requirements for quick outage response, efficient maintenance, and accountability for assets; the Facilities Systems Support Office (FSSO) was tasked with combining existing GIS, CADD, hard copy, and local knowledge data into one, centralized GIS database. URS Group, Inc. was contracted to integrate existing data sources and field verify utility infrastructure using GPS. This four-year program yielded GIS data that is now being used for GIS analysis and modeling, particularly with the Esri Utility Network Analyst extension for ArcGIS.