Network Analyst - Prepare Week

Special Topics - Project 1 Week 1

Our first project was to act as a city employee preparing for a major hurricane projected to make landfall the next week.  The project was divided into three stages to complete over three weeks; Prepare, Analyze, and Report.  

With a major hurricane projected to hit Tampa, Florida the city has to make preparations for the storm.  Those preparation included determining road closures in low-lying areas likely to be impacted by the storm, evacuation routes and plans, distribution plans for FEMA aid to storm shelters, and basic information to the public.

This week, for the Prepare stage, a basemap was created to use in the following weeks.  We started with several feature classes of data required to complete the analysis in the next stage.  These included streets, fire and police departments, hospital, shelters and a National Guard Armory locations, a DEM and a boundary of the study area.  

The first task was to clip all the feature classes to the boundary of the study area and reproject them to the specified projection.  Python tools were provided to perform these tasks in batches, but an update to ArcMap seems to have made them a bit glitchy so it took a lot more time and effort to use the tools than to do each feature class one by one.  Still, it was a good refresher on how to edit tools.

Once the clipping and projecting was done the DEM was reclassified into a discrete data set with several categories of elevations, then converted from a raster to a polygon for those areas less than 6 feet.  A couple fields were added to the streets layer in order to determine which streets were likely to flood and create the best routes throughout the city and around the flooded areas.

Another tricky step was editing and exporting the metadata.  Some of the datasets had complete metadata, some had some or none.  For those that needed data added, the export process worked just fine.  The datasets that didn't require data added transferred to the new folder, but the metadata didn't transfer with it.  In order to get the files to transfer with their metadata I had to make and save something in each of the files.  

The map was saved to a Map Package and zipped with the Metadata folder.