{"id":24555,"date":"2016-02-05T16:23:41","date_gmt":"2016-02-05T20:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fondriest.com\/news\/?p=24555"},"modified":"2021-11-10T16:39:42","modified_gmt":"2021-11-10T20:39:42","slug":"amid-flint-water-crisis-gis-effort-maps-citys-pipes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fondriest.com\/news\/amid-flint-water-crisis-gis-effort-maps-citys-pipes.htm","title":{"rendered":"Amid Flint Water Crisis, GIS Effort Maps City\u2019s Pipes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The City of Flint, Michigan\u2019s drinking water woes have been national news for weeks. So have the difficulties that those working on the ground have dealt with.<\/p>\n

One headache, which isn\u2019t altogether uncommon for any American city, is poor record-keeping. As folks working to respond to the high levels of lead in the city\u2019s water found, Flint\u2019s water utility didn\u2019t have data showing the precise locations of lead pipes in the city.<\/p>\n

So when researchers at the University of Michigan \u2013 Flint set out to begin a GIS mapping effort to document where city pipes were located, even before the current state of emergency declared in January, they found that there was little to work with.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe approached the city back in October (2015). It was after the state of emergency that a couple of other agencies started mapping,\u201d said Marty Kaufman, professor and chair of the Department of Earth and Resource Science at the university. He is leading an effort to map all the city\u2019s water pipes to pinpoint where the lead ones are. \u201cThe records were on some type of spreadsheet that looked like something out of the library I grew up using in middle school. That was in the 1960s when we didn\u2019t have automatic record-keeping.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was surprising that the records were so lacking, Kaufman says, simply because the water utility is a fairly large one that oversees drinking water for more than 100,000 people. But to make up for the holes in the data, he and others had to find a workaround. <\/p>\n

That process began with taking digital images that the city had showing the existence of water pipes, typically marked with letters indicating what metal they were made of. Copper pipes, for example, were marked with a \u201cC,\u201d while lead ones were marked with an \u201cL.\u201d From there, it was a matter of decrypting the letters, which were sometimes hard to make out, and then transferring them to parcel maps.<\/p>\n

\"Pipes

Pipes in green, built after 1986, can be assumed to not have any lead because the material was outlawed for use in pipe construction that year. (Credit: Marty Kaufman & Troy Rosencrants \/ University of Michigan – Flint Geographic Information Systems Center)<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWe can georeference them with an existing database of parcels,\u201d said Kaufman. \u201cBy copying the code from plastic images into a real database, that allows us to look for clusters of pipes. That allows association to lead levels.\u201d There were some parcels that didn\u2019t have markings indicating what type of pipes were used, so physical inspections will need to be done on those, Kaufman says.<\/p>\n

The effort has pretty much wrapped up, but is in a quality-control phase right now. Researchers are adding metadata to the maps that they\u2019ve created to offer descriptions that will help those who use them have an easier experience. The metadata will also help Kaufman\u2019s crew as their work into the drinking water problems continues, such as helping construction workers looking for lead pipes or predicting where medical problems — like high levels of lead in blood — may be prevalent.<\/p>\n

And there are some useful insights to report. Kaufman says that most of the lead pipes are ones that branch off of main channels and link directly to homes. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s where the lead is. There\u2019s a potential for lead in the mains in bell and spigot joints made before 1950, which may have lead as a joiner,\u201d said Kaufman. \u201cIt\u2019s unlikely, but it\u2019s possible. It\u2019s hard to know because the records in the city were very poor.\u201d<\/p>\n

The maps will include shades to indicate ages of pipes as well, broken down by those installed before 1950, between 1950 and 1986, and those that came after. The post-1986 ones can easily be assumed to not have lead because that was the year that using lead in pipes was outlawed.<\/p>\n

Taking factors like that into consideration with the parcel maps, Kaufman says that some zones of the city are more likely to have lead pipes than others. These hot spots appear to make a ring around the city\u2019s outskirts. Toward the city\u2019s center, the problem isn\u2019t as common.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re still looking at the data, but it\u2019s probably correlated with the oldest homes in Flint,\u201d said Kaufman. \u201cIt makes kind of a ring around the town center on all sides.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once the project wraps up, Kaufman expects that the maps he and others from the university\u2019s Geographic Information Systems Center have generated will prove useful for tackling Flint\u2019s water crisis. The approach could also be used in solving drinking water problems encountered by other cities with poor records of where pipes are located. <\/p>\n

\u201cAll water utilities should try to map all locations of their pipes, including the ones going into homes,\u201d said Kaufman.<\/p>\n

Top image:\u00a0The Flint River in Michigan circa 1979. (Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

University of Michigan – Flint scientists use a GIS approach to map Flint water pipes and pinpoint the ones most likely containing lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":24549,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,49],"tags":[166,60,109,348,176,318],"class_list":["post-24555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-articles","category-rivers-streams","tag-drinking-water","tag-featured","tag-news-ticker","tag-rivers-streams","tag-top-story","tag-university-of-michigan"],"remote_post_permalink":false,"remote_post_featured_image":false,"yoast_head":"\nAmid Flint Water Crisis, GIS Effort Maps City\u2019s Pipes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"University of Michigan - Flint scientists use a GIS approach to map Flint water pipes and pinpoint the ones most likely containing lead.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.fondriest.com\/news\/amid-flint-water-crisis-gis-effort-maps-citys-pipes.htm\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Amid Flint Water Crisis, GIS Effort Maps City\u2019s Pipes\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"University of Michigan - 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