Abstract

City Of Atlanta: investing in a useable water utility GIS
Track: Water, Wastewater, and Stormwater
Authors: Ryan McKeon, Rasheed Ahmad, Michael (Dax) Flinn

In a strategic effort to sustainably rehabilitate its aging water system, the City of Atlanta's Department of Watershed Management (DWM) initiated a project to increase system control. The first phase of this project focused on increasing asset usability of some 80,000 water valves and fire hydrants in the system. This first phase was completed in early 2012 and while widely regarded as successful, there remained an opportunity to increase information usability. To fully leverage the GPS and asset data captured in the first phase of the project, the DWM commissioned a team of professionals to construct a water utility GIS. This presentation will review the processes and lessons learned from the second phase of the project, which focused on the consolidation of data spread across 7,000 plat card drawings, hundreds of thousands of inspection records and 80,000 GPS data points into a spatially accurate, content rich and widely available GIS.