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South Louisiana Parish Can Now "React" Better To Rising Flood Waters Thanks To A Combined Effort Between Its Local Government, A Small Business And NASA


November 24, 2003 - Stennis Space Center
The NVision REACT Interface
For residents in South Louisiana, enduring flash floods and dodging hurricanes are as common as gumbo and Saints football, albeit nowhere nearly as enjoying. Developed low lying areas are subject to the casualties of water inundation, such as destroyed homes and automobiles, millions of dollars in property damage, and far too often, the loss of life. No group is more familiar with the effects of water inundation for this area than the St. Tammany Parish Emergency Management Operations Center (EMOC).

In an effort to combat the avoidable problems associated with these phenomena, the St. Tammany EMOC turned to NASA for help through its Office of Technology Transfer and Development at Stennis Space Center in South Mississippi. A combined effort between the EMOC, NASA Stennis and a small, geospatial applications company called NVision Solutions has provided St. Tammany Parish with a new line of defense called REACT, or Real-time Emergency Action Coordination Tool.

REACT is a decision support system developed by NVision that supports various real-time models. Initially developed and deployed by NVision to support St Tammany Parish's EMOC flood mitigation efforts, REACT can be extended to support numerous types of geographic impact models. The system was developed under a NASA Dual-Use Development contract at Stennis, with each group bringing its own expertise to the table. St. Tammany Parish offered a problem that needed an accurate and real-time response, NASA offered software development, and NVision offered proven experience in web-based real-time GIS application development. NASA Stennis and St. Tammany Parish split the bill, while NVision contributed an estimated XXXXXXX of their own internal research and development.

St. Tammany Parish is characterized by huge areas of densely populated low-lying areas. The potential for inundation comes from numerous sources: 1) torrential or enduring precipitation that overwhelms existing drainage controls; 2) drainages that exceed their maximum capacity; and 3) slosh effects from Lake Pontchartrain. The problem is further exasperated by the fact that routinely all three of these potential threats coincide. Once inundation occurs it is highly likely that health and human services concerns are at their highest priority. Ongoing concerns with septic tanks, waste treatment systems, school district transportation, hospital access and emergency evacuation route issues all compete for and require emergent attention.

To add to this dilemma, St. Tammany Parish has been the fastest growing area in the state of Louisiana since the early 1990s and is currently the 5th fastest growing parish/county in the United States, according to St. Tammany Parish officials. The increase in population and business growth and the insurgence of land development in the parish compete against the land's low elevation, abundant waterways, poor drainage infrastructure, the absence of an adequate levee system and the area's high precipitation levels.

St. Tammany Parish was looking for ways to lessen the potential of this disastrous combination of factors when it turned to the NASA Stennis office for help. "The relationship that developed with NASA, NVision and St. Tammany Parish government was the epitome of a win-win-win situation. The flexibility that this program will afford parish government in development planning and emergency preparedness is incalculable," said Larry Hess, acting director of the St. Tammany Parish EMOC.

While REACT won't prevent the waters from rising, it does offer St. Tammany Parish residents an early warning to take action. The system collects meteorological data from various sources around and upstream from St. Tammany Parish, including USGS gauging stations, Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, NOAA, the Lake Pontchartrain Institute and the Causeway Foundation. This real-time data is combined with other relevant information about the area in the form of a Geographic Information System (GIS), such as roadways and transportation, elevation, population, property ownership and value, water inundation levels and damage estimates.

The meteorological data is transferred to the EMOC's computer system in real time. The system conducts spatial analysis using the GIS database to provide visualization of analytical data. As the water rises, REACT captures all vital statistics about the next area in threat, such as residents phone numbers, roads and evacuation routes and critical facilities that may be threatened. Emergency responders can begin calling residents with warnings, planning for alternate evacuation routes, and evacuating facilities such as nursing homes and schools before roads are cut off. The early warning also allows residents time to move automobiles, furniture and other valuables to higher ground before evacuating.

NVision helped cut the costs and the development time of REACT by building on existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) programs, such as BasinTools, the company's own watershed modeling program, and ESRI's ArcINFO, ArcIMS and ArcSDE. By using COTS, it also made the program more efficient, reliable and easy to use.

To maintain the integrity of the system, NVision used ArcIMS to create the data portal. It has a multi-tiered access ranging from public information access to system management. Various tasks are monitored and launched based on information provided by the data portal. Additionally, a geospatial data warehouse was implemented and configured for use with the model and to support the portal. Access to the warehouse is limited to sources deemed appropriate by the parish and range from public access to highly restricted access.

St. Tammany Parish was eager to implement REACT into its EMOC for flood inundation maintenance, and is also excited to use the system as part of its Parish planning process for land development. "It has been and continues to be the vision of our Parish President Kevin Davis to provide the residents of St. Tammany Parish with the most advance and accurate tools with which to plan for growth and development while improving our overall public safety profile. With the assistance of NASA and NVision, we have taken a major step in that direction," Hess said.

But the potential for use of this system does not stop when the floodwaters recede. NVision Vice President Craig Harvey said the system was developed to support a variety of impact models such as fires, hazardous material spills, airborne biochemical agents, and many others of crucial importance to first responders.

"We take great pride in the development and deployment of an application that has the potential to positively affect so many of our friends and neighbors," said Socorro Harvey, president and CEO of NVision. "We look forward to the continued development and subsequent deployment of the system in support of first responders regionally and ultimately nationwide."

NVision is a small, woman-owned, minority-owned firm that specializes in advanced geospatial solutions. It is headquartered at the Mississippi Enterprise for Technology (MsET) business incubator at Stennis Space Center and has a satellite office in Slidell, La. For more information about NVision Solutions, Inc., contact the company at (228) 688-3951, or at info@nvisionsolutions.com. << Back to News Archive