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Meegan Holland Director of Communications for Gov. Rick Snyder Office: 517-335-6397 Mobile: 517-420-2714 xxxEND_PAGE:treasury01_b41_7622_7971_308 When state experts sat down with Flint planners two days after Gov. Rick Snyder declared a water emergency, they asked about the locations of lead water pipes connecting to residents’ homes. The information was mostly there, on paper, filed in a large vault. There are hundreds of hand-drawn plat maps from the 1980s and hand-written notes on thousands of cards about updates to home plumbing systems. Over the years, a dedicated Flint city employee has been translating inspectors’ handwritten notes about plumbing updates into an Excel spreadsheet. But like many cities with limited budgets, Flint doesn’t have a robust staff converting the information from paper to searchable data. All that paper is now being be digitized so the State Emergency Operations Center can figure out where safe water is needed. Five GIS analysts are working on the project — including one from FEMA, which entered the picture after President Obama granted Gov. Snyder’s request for a federal emergency on Jan. 16. Mapping infrastructure to this depth of detail is highly unusual, said James Tchorzynski, manager of the GIS analysts for the Emergency Management and Homeland Security Division of the Michigan State Police. In a disaster like severe flooding, “You’re used to watching the water rise and you count the houses. Here, it’s all underground.” Once the maps are in digital format, they’re synched with 2015 parcel data. Then they can be overlayed with Census information and infrastructure information, allowing analysts to pinpoint which inhabited homes have lead service lines. That has been the job of Scott Bailey, a FEMA GIS analyst, for the past several days. “The state is doing a great job of collecting the data,” said Scott Bailey, a GIS data analyst with FEMA helping with the mapping project. “That’s going to be a success story that comes out of this. They're able to upload large amounts of data in a matter of hours.” Credit goes to the ArcGIS Online app that the state is using to upload home data in real time. Teams going door to door to deliver water supplies to residents are armed with iPads and the app, which feeds into the GIS system, noting whether there are children in the household and which ones have been provided with bottled water, a water test kit, a water filter and replacement cartridges. //// GIVE UPDATED NUMBERS HERE —- HOW MANY PARCELS 56,254, HOW MANY HOMES 38,144, HOW MANY SO FAR WITH LEAD SERVICE LINES? 3,600 OUT OF 26,000??//// The app information also helps Nikkia Anderson, a Michigan State Police GIS data analyst who is determining the number of inhabited homes in a city severely affected by blight.