State of Florida’s Geospatial Team Working on Deepwater Horizon Response

Thanks to Richard Butgereit, the GIS Administrator for the Florida Department of Environmental Management, we have a review of Florida’s work to mitigate the impact of oil washing onto the Florida coastline.

Directions Magazine (DM): Who is helping the State of Florida in developing a geospatial data repository to help mitigate the oil spill?


Richard Butgereit, GIS Administrator, Florida DEM (FL):
The State of Florida uses geospatial data created by the responsible party and its contractors, federal agencies including the Coast Guard, NOAA, and EPA, and several state agencies for the Deepwater Horizon Response. Access to the data has been facilitated by Florida State Emergency Response Team (SERT) staff embedded in the Mobile Incident Command Post and the Florida Peninsula Command Post in Miami and other area and incident commands, as well as through NOAA’s ERMA and Office of Restoration and Response (ORR) FTP site, USGS Hazard Data Distribution System (HDDS), and data discovery through Virtual USA.



The SERT has been collecting geospatial data for boom verification, natural resources data, reconnaissance reports, geotagged photographs, and other data related to this response.  Adhering to the State of Florida’s strong public records law and open government standards, geospatial data created by the SERT has been provided via publicly accessible websites like GATOR, Incident Mapper and SERT Natural Resource Data Assessment.



Of particular note, the SERT has collected over 75,000 geotagged photos, totaling over 240 gigabytes of photos, as well as over 7,000 reconnaissance reports and made them available through GATOR, the Incident Mapper, as downloadable shapefiles, and via map services.



DM: Are you (i.e. Florida GIS) receiving or providing data from NGA? NOAA?

FL: Throughout the response, SERT has used imagery and derived products provided by NGA through HSIN and USGS HDDS FTP and REST services, and data from NOAA through ERMA and the ORR FTP site.



DM: Are any of these data going to BP and is BP funneling any data back to state agencies?



FL: Yes, as previously mentioned and adhering to the State of Florida’s strong public records law and open government standards, geospatial data created by the SERT for the Deepwater Horizon Response is available to partners in the response as well as to the public. In addition to the publically accessible web mapping sites mentioned above, the SERT makes data available via Keyhole Markup Language (KML) for globe viewers, REST map services for use with popular desktop GIS applications, as well as for direct download in numerous formats like GeoRSS, KML and zipped shapefile.  Our Deepwater Horizon Response GIS data resources page is available at http://www.floridadisaster.org/gis/dhr for more details on services and downloadable data.



DM: What other state agencies are requesting data from you in support of clean-up efforts?

FL: Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection is the lead agency for this response, working along with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Florida Division of Emergency Management. Along the way, numerous other state agencies including the Department of Health, Department of Transportation, Florida counties, Agency for Workforce Innovation, and Water Management Districts have also requested and/or produced data.