GIS perspective
Jackson: Well, your infrastructure might be out of sight, but I would bet it’s in no way out of your mind. And it may come as a surprise, but it’s never far from my mind! As a GIS professional, one of my primary objectives is to map infrastructure any place, any time, anywhere. But first, I need to find it and record it with accuracy, preferably directly from the field. That is why GIS and subsurface utility engineering (SUE) professionals need to be familiar with how they can complement each other’s work.

Recently, McKim & Creed’s GIS and SUE groups teamed to locate, map, and document a regional nuclear power plant’s underground () infrastructure. The client needed the SUE team’s eyewitness account of the actual pipe size, depth, material, and condition. SUE provided the expertise, equipment, historical site knowledge, client contracts, and documents. The GIS team complemented the SUE team’s effort by creating the framework, or working database, that housed and centralized all of the field data. The combined team provided the client a money- and time-saving approach, as the field data was recorded only once. This also minimized the chance of errors.

Because the SUE data collectors had been set up from the beginning of the project to match the final GIS database, this tedious final step became a seamless, quick process. Working closely with SUE meant the GIS group was able to share existing data, avoid task redundancies, and shorten the project schedule.

At the final progress meeting, the GIS and SUE teams met with the client and information technology representative to review the basics about the GIS database. We symbolized features, organized the data layers, and adjusted the map template to the client’s specifications.

Your infrastructure may be from view, and possibly even from your mind, but someday you might urgently need to know about what you can’t see. Take a few minutes — today — to start the process of talking with SUE and GIS professionals about how your invisible concerns can be a valuable, tangible, and highly visible reality!

SUE professional’s perspective
Brown: A nuclear power plant is just one example of critical infrastructure where we are using a combination of technologies to keep our minds on our client’s buried utilities. An “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy may work for site aesthetics, but it doesn’t work for the engineer responsible for safety, budgets, and preparedness planning.

Many power plants across the country are in need of maintenance and are ready for designed expansion. The plant we worked with is no exception. Previous SUE mapping on the site proved that the available record information was insufficient for the planned changes. The plant engineers needed to have confidence in their utility maps so they could predict every conflict and plan for it.

We knew SUE could provide the data for those utility maps at just a fraction of the overall design and construction budget, and we — and our client — were thinking of future generations. What information would future engineers need when the time came for another expansion? That’s why we brought in GIS.

The power of SUE is that it gathers a lot of accurate data on buried utilities. The power of a GIS is that it organizes a lot of data and makes it accessible. And the dynamic nature of a GIS makes it the best platform to store updated changes to utility systems. Rather than getting a snapshot of a CAD-generated map, the GIS can tell the story of a buried system from planning to install to upgrade and maintenance — all while knowing the exact horizontal and vertical position of the entire system.

Janet Jackson, GISP, heads McKim & Creed’s GIS activities company-wide.
Douglas B. Brown, P.G., director of SUE services at McKim & Creed, has been in the utility mapping industry for nearly 25 years. Contact Jackson and Brown at intersect@mckimcreed.com. McKim & Creed is an engineering, surveying, and planning firm.