Ice

Not a Hike

Late at night on Friday February 12th 2021, Salem experienced a once in a lifetime ice storm.

Approximately one inch of ice accumulated overnight. Thousands of trees were damaged. Limbs and trees fell on power and telecommunication lines crippling much of the city and surrounding area for days.

Over 1/4 million people under PGE service were left without power.

City parks and the urban canopy were particularly hard hit.

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As the Parks GIS analyst, I felt some personal responsibility for ensuring the city had the GIS tools to assess damage and manage clean up. This would give us a better chance of receiving FEMA reimbursement.

A core group of 7 GIS professionals, with the help and support of other work groups, in less than 2 weeks, built and implemented a whole new data collection system. We created field collection tools to assess damage. We integrated this into a new work order system to assign clean up crews. This new workflow maintains our existing asset management system as our system of record.

Damage to the city is in the millions of dollars. Reimbursement from FEMA will be critical to maintaining the budget for many programs and jobs.

I’m proud of the work I did on this and it’s my hope I helped make a difference in the end. FEMA reimbursement isn’t guaranteed and there are still thousands of damaged trees to clean up.