case study
The City of Eugene, Oregon, is a vibrant community known for its natural beauty and commitment to preserving its parks and open spaces. The Public Works Parks and Open Space (POS) team has experienced its fair share of ice storms, which can have a profound impact on the city and its residents. To manage ice storm response more effectively, the team implemented geographic information system (GIS) technology to improve its ability to enhance the safety and well-being of community members. Although the use of modern GIS tools has transformed the storm response effort, “The most important part of any emergency storm response event I have been involved in during my 30-year tenure at the City of Eugene is our dedicated staff,” says Eric Cariaga, GIS analyst and administrator with POS. “Our staff’s commitment to service is obvious in the way they have shown up, even when their families were without power and their homes were affected. No matter how many advancements we make in technology, without our dedicated staff willing to go out and clear roads and mitigate hazards, the technology used would be irrelevant.”
Dedicated Eugene first responders meet with technical staff to review updated functionality and modifications to their GIS applications before going out in the field for the day.
Nevertheless, GIS tools have been “vital to our ability to complete and track work, both on blue-sky days and especially during emergencies,” emphasized Eugene Public Works director Matt Rodrigues.
Before 2016, Eugene staff could not spatially track and organize tree-related storm damage and relied heavily on their call intake system to drive response efforts. On-site staff would respond to calls from the public regarding hazards and complete work orders without detailed documentation. They would simply turn a list of completed jobs over to the office or radio in to the command center that a job was complete. They wouldn’t take any photos or document what kind of hazard they were dealing with, or the work they had done to mitigate it.
The chaos that resulted during significant ice storms could not be effectively managed by a centralized model. Public calls were recorded in the Maintenance Management System, a custom-built application and call intake system. Those calls would be triaged by a small group of operation chiefs and dispatched to over 50 on-site crews through paper lists of addresses or over handheld radios. While having the ability to utilize the eyes of Eugene’s 178,000 valued community members is critical to providing excellent service, solely relying on citizen input and a centralized model created inefficiencies and slower response times to potentially life-threatening hazards.
Over 3,000 GIS work orders were created during the 2024 ice storm, most of them from a mobile device. The ability to capture photos while on-site via GIS work orders is a critical part of the documentation process.
In 2016, the POS staff had started capitalizing on ArcGIS Online and had enough Creator accounts to start decentralizing a hectic model of work order dispatching to empower their staff to implement a “storm scout” model. With this in place, the call intake system was now being pulled into web maps so scouts could visualize, document, assign, and prioritize work using custom services (layers) via ArcGIS Field Maps on mobile devices. These highly skilled tree scouts worked methodically throughout the city. First, they canvassed and documented the inspection of priority routes—high-traffic roadways and areas where there was more of a chance that failing trees could damage property or injure the public. They then branched out to other areas of the city, eventually evaluating every street, park, and trail in Eugene. Now that there was a visual element to calls from the public, staff could quickly break route to verify high-priority calls and create work orders. These efficiencies were important to assist emergency services in moving freely through the travel ways and getting the community back on its feet.
The POS Emergency Management Response Map shows work orders symbolized by the crew the work was assigned to, the priority, status, and task. This empowers on-site staff to self-dispatch, thus creating a more efficient response.
"We empowered our staff with these tools by creating services where it was easy for them to track near real-time storm data from both a desktop web application and their mobile device,” said Eric Cariaga, GIS analyst and administrator with POS. “We had technicians, contract managers, field staff, storm scouts, and our response crews all working from these apps to help in our storm response effort."
The responding city staff capitalized on GIS for their tree inventory, which contains information important to storm response such as location, species, diameter, height, and health. Understanding the type of tree is important to this ice storm workflow because each tree responds differently to the ice. Softwood tree limbs bend and flex with the ice, but hardwood trees hold the weight until they reach a critical mass and violently break. Many of the hardwood trees reached this critical mass at the same time and increased the number of work orders from 12 tree calls on the first two days to over 600 calls.
Field Maps Designer helped ensure quality data entry with the use of smart forms and staff safety using geofencing around EWEB power outages and identified electrical hazards.
The City of Eugene’s utilization of Esri's industry-standard GIS platform provides an opportunity for seamless data sharing and integration, thus preparing them for potentially larger-scale emergency events such as earthquakes. In this response, the POS GIS team began pulling data from their regional partners from Eugene Water & Electric Board (EWEB), Lane County, the City of Springfield, and Oregon Emergency Management. This regional GIS data, coupled with the tree inventory and many other City GIS data layers, helped better inform incident commanders and response crews of where there was likely to be considerable damage and potential electrical hazards.
During this 2024 ice storm, new features within Esri’s suite of products were implemented to increase efficiency and staff safety. When an electrical line was involved with a given work order, the geofencing feature in Field Maps Designer was utilized to alert any staff within a 750-foot radius. A custom push notification alert was sent to their mobile devices indicating that they may be close to a potential electrical hazard. Alerts remained in place until certified EWEB staff verified that the line was turned off and the area was safe for the on-site crews to mitigate the tree hazard. Additionally, for tracking the debris cleanup and hazard mitigation effort, POS GIS staff implemented location tracking of their on-site crews by utilizing the “my tracks” option in Field Maps. The storm scouts drove up and down each street and their route was tracked all day, allowing them to verify where they had scouted for tree hazards. This real-time data feed also streamlines the efficiency of the response efforts. All response staff can look at the map and see who is closest to a community member request and make geographically based decisions on who is responding to a specific work order. The necessary number of licenses and newly implemented functionality were available to Eugene due to a recent acquisition of an Esri enterprise agreement (EA).
The Emergency Response Dashboard was an extremely vital tool for the team to track the storm response efforts, but even more so for the city manager and executive managers. The dashboard provided city leaders with a holistic real-time view of the response effort, critical insight into the recovery efforts timelines, and provided assurance that the team's efforts were being managed effectively and efficiently.
“Our GIS tools are vital to our ability to complete and track work, both on blue-sky days and especially during emergencies,” said Eugene Public Works director Matt Rodrigues. “The city values data-driven decision-making, and GIS data informs our stewardship of resources.”
When Todd Johnson, GIS administrator, City of Eugene Public Works Parks and Open Space, began his career, it was as a park specialist. Todd’s first tree-related storm response was in 2014, and he remembers the way things were before the use of any GIS tools or the storm scout model. “Far too often during storms, we would hear the words ‘stand-by’ over the radio while we sat and waited for our next job, hoping it wasn’t another duplicate call or that we would have to drive by undocumented issues that were a higher priority,” recalled Johnson. “It was terribly inefficient compared to our new model and tool chest, which decentralized command and empowered the experienced staff in the field who had eyes on the ground.”
Before utilizing this broad range of GIS applications (web applications, web maps, Field Maps, and ArcGIS Dashboards), the storm response teams lacked spatial awareness of critical assets such as trees and a shared real-time view of prioritized work orders. Knowing where key assets and prioritized detailed work orders were located was crucial to their storm response model. If an outage occurred and one of their apps went down, it would halt the work of 80 staff members and significantly reduce the organization’s recovery efforts. GIS serves as the mission-critical technology for the City of Eugene and has replaced handwritten lists and printed paper maps. Without GIS, the team's newly found workflow efficiency would be completely obsolete, and they would lack the ability to have accurate reporting for this FEMA qualifying event.
Tracking all the data on any given work order validates their efforts during the FEMA auditing process. Before-and-after photos and X Y coordinates of every storm response work order has helped the team tremendously during the reimbursement process.
"We have come so far, and these tools have helped us so much. The thought of us going back to our old chaotic system makes me anxious and stressed. Thankfully, the successes we have had with our deployment of GIS solutions have all but ensured its use in future emergency events."