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First and foremost, our core duties is to keep the lights on and the operational side of the business. That is our day to day function.
Thank you for joining us today for the Western Watts podcast. I'm Elizabeth Schilling.
I'm Julia Perry. And we
are here today with Rich Garcia, who I'm going to call the maps guy. Thanks for being with us, Rich.
Thanks for having me.
So tell us about your role at Tri-State, and what is GIS?
I'm the geospatial data systems manager here at Tri-State. Been here for actually fifteen years this month. Been around, seen GIS develop at Tri-State over the years. I basically lead the department of mapping professionals that have a background in geospatial technology and and geosciences. I lead that team, and we provide map based solutions for the entire company.
What does GIS stand for?
I've heard a lot of jokes about what GIS stands for, but what it actually stands for is geographic information systems. It is a information system that enables the geo the locational part of information. It could be a structure. It could be a transmission line. It could be a environmental area that's important to avoid when we're planning to build a transmission line.
It's anything that has a location. That's why geography kinda matters is to meld that geography into the actual information and provide that to our customers who are an internal folks here at Tri-State.
When you talk about locations, it's not like maps that say we have a structure at the intersection of two existing very well known roads. We're talking about up on a mountain somewhere. Maybe there's access roads. What are some of those elements that are included on maps that are unique to Tri-State?
I would say a lot of it has to do with our infrastructure. Right? Our structures, t lines, and substations. I think when you think about in terms of the different layers and the region of it, it kinda starts with our surface territory, all our members' surface territory, and then it whittles down to the infrastructure all the way down to the structure.
So you have all of these maps, all this data that you're working with. What are your core duties as a department?
Our team works with pretty much almost every department within Tri-State on a daily basis, just providing geospatial solutions, mapping maps, web based maps, and maps on mobile applications to our internal customers, to all the different departments to support their everyday processes. That's number one. We call it keeping the lights on. We've been calling it that for some time now. That is our prime focus.
But on top of that, our core charge as a GIS team is to develop and maintain that geospatial strategy that supports the business. Because the technology changes constantly. Our secondary piece of what we do is developing that geospatial strategy, checking in with the customers to make sure that our strategy aligns with what their needs are, and then also communicating with all the different departments that need to be involved to keep that strategy moving in the right direction. That is a big part of what we do as a team. And our team, like I mentioned before, has geography background folks, geoscience background folks.
But we also have technology developers that we work with in IT and project manager background, people who've been in consulting that are on our team to help move that geospatial strategy forward.
Geospatial is a cool word,
not something I do in my day to day. Is Tri-State service territory difficult to make maps for?
That's a good question. I was here when we actually developed that layer. That was one of the first layers that we kinda had to get a handle on. It was our service territory, our member boundaries. We purchased that data from a vendor at the time called Penwell. They weren't super accurate. Over time, we've enhanced it by reaching out to our members who have GIS. Not all of them do.
How do you figure out if there is a discrepancy? Is that literally a guy out in a field with a GPS device being like, here's the coordinates?
Well, for service territory boundaries, no. You wouldn't field check that because it's so abstract. It's there are times where we do have different layers that are very large scale layers. We could take a GPS unit out and ground truth where that structure is or where that gate to that substation is, and we can adjust our maps accordingly.
At the most basic level, we need maps to tell us where do we operate, where is all of our stuff out there. But then really there's that back and forth where your team might be providing information through GIS systems that other teams can use to do their work better. And then also they might be feeding information into the systems that then makes a more complete set of data for your team to work with. Can you tell us about examples of how that works?
A good example of that would be our easement application that we have developed and maintained for our land rights and permitting group. There's several things that go into an easement. We develop that geography, that polygon envelope, if you will, that goes around our transmission line. That's the spatial component to it. The legal document that's attached to that easement lives in our document management system, Intelli Docs Documentum.
We've developed an application where you can go zoom into the map, click on that easement. That sends a query out, and it automatically pulls up the actual PDF easement. That really helps our land rights group get easy access to the document that they need when they're dealing with an issue. Instead of having to go through a whole separate system and trying to figure out which document to pull, they can say, I know I need the easements for this area that we have a problem at or there's an issue, and pull them up just through GIS.
You mentioned that you developed that as an application for Tri-State. Is the easement application something that's standard to the industry, or is that something new that you came up with?
With Steve Gray, we developed the easement application from something he saw at the Esri conference. Since then, his team uses on a daily basis. He's really excited about it and proud of it. Catherine Selen on my team was the person that Dave Mitchell developed the technology. Catherine developed the actual easements and initially started building the easements from legal descriptions, which I don't know if any of you have read a legal description before, but she had that skill set of being able to read a legal description and create geometry from that.
She presented on that at a transmission user group meeting that we go to. There was an Esri person there that happened to be the utilities director for Esri and thought that was a really great example of how to deploy their technology. He asked us to do a paper on that, and Catherine wrote it up. And they published that on their utilities website. It was highlighted last year. It was really cool.
That's awesome. Great work to you and everybody that worked on it. That's very cool.
It's hard to imagine that skill, taking a legal document and turning it into a shape on a map.
I don't understand. You said it, and I don't understand who
I don't understand how she does it either. She's magic.
It feels like in a physical sense, if you're looking at a map and you put your finger on a spot, it would automatically open the file drawer and point to the file that you need where things what it does. But all electronically. That feels really handy. Yes.
I like that. Yes.
Some of the work that Tri-State teams might be looking at might be managing outages, planning for future transmission routes, managing our field operations. How do they integrate with GIS as they're looking at doing that work?
Okay. It's a good question. For outage management, we developed a geospatial lightning application that correlates an outage when it occurs with a potential lightning strike. We purchased a subscription to lightning data that's live and it provides a flood of information of when there's a storm and we get tons and tons of lightning locations come in. We developed a way to filter through that and correlate that with an outage.
Our operations folks, it just basically gives them a little helpful information that, hey. That could be due to lightning, that we had that outage, and they know what to go look for.
Who tracks lightning? Is that, like, a weather service thing?
We get our lightning data feed from a company called Visalia that we purchased a subscription to.
That's amazing that someone thought, oh, someone somewhere will want this data. Like, they probably started tracking it before there was a customer for it.
Have you guys ever seen a storm track or something like that on the news where they show all the different lightning? That's the same type of data that we're ingesting into our system and correlating it with outages. And that is probably one of the more complex applications that we've developed over time.
Oh, what makes it complex?
We had to figure out a way to filter through it and not just be inundated with data because it would pick up cloud to cloud lightning strikes, and it would just overload our system.
Since I have you captive, what were some of the metrics you were using to filter it?
Time, basically. We would take the time of the outage and correlate that to the time of the lightning strike and also geography. We buffered our entire system and would intersect those lightning locations. We would ignore everything outside of the buffer, and that made that query a lot easier because then we were only looking at things within a certain buffer of our system.
That's like the flight tracker maps where the icon of the plane is so big that it looks like a whole section of land is covered in When
you say develop an application, what counts as an application?
There's mobile applications. Our maintenance folks used to carry around larger GPS units with an antenna on the top that was embedded in it. Now, we've moved to applications that are running on iPhones. Much smaller, much more compact, but we've always had mobile applications, something that you can use outside of the office. Another would be our web based application.
The entire company has access to the GeoPortal. That is just basically our system map with additional layers that you can go in and turn on and explore on our internal website. And then there's also custom applications like some of the ones I described for Lightning and Easement. When the user engages with the technology, it actually sets off a process that returns something specific.
When a user is adding data back into the system, when you said it's triggering the process, does that mean if someone's putting in transmission line on-site that gets added to the application or something like that?
Yeah. For transmission lines, it's a little bit more manual. We do design the transmission lines and structures within engineering. Transmission engineering takes care of that in a different software package. And that's the beauty of GIS.
It's very agnostic to different technologies. The software that's used to design a transmission line can be easily ingested into our system in Burlington, Lamar, for example. That was a new transmission line. When it was energized, we get that data in the native format that our engineers use, and we load it into GIS, and it just appears on the Geoportal.
That's true. You would already know where the transmission line is going by the time you were digging the hole in the ground to put the transmission pole in. Foreign average transmission maintenance map, what types of layers of data are you typically working with?
Typically, we're working with substations, transmission lines, and structures. And the access around them, those are very highly visible layers.
When you say access to, is that this is the road you would take to okay. Because, again, like I was saying, it's not like at the intersection of two major roads. Yeah. It's maybe just an access road that only Tri-State is?
Yes. So that's where the easement comes in. We wanna make sure we can use GIS to make sure that those access roads are on those easements. And we work with the maintenance team on that to make sure that those match up.
When I've worked with some of the maintenance teams recording their veg management process, the only place they were able to store the material was in or around that easement. I guess it's very useful to be able to track with and can you get a truck in to move any of it? Because then that would determine, oh, I can't or can't get a masticator. Are you also tracking the topography to be like, nope. You need a helicopter to get in there. Sorry, bud.
Our access roads have different levels on them. Walk in only truck, the different types of levels that they can use to get the different type of equipment in there. And when we do permit a new line or build a new line, and we work our land rights and permitting folks, we try to categorize the access roads in a way that it is available to the maintenance guys on what type of access that is to get in there.
What is the file size of the average map?
We probably have over 300 individual layers or related tables in our enterprise database right now. And that's still not huge in terms of terabytes of data. Where the terabytes come in is the imagery that we flew a while ago for a LiDAR project that we had, and we got one foot resolution pixel imagery for our entire system. It was over ten years ago, but we still have that data. And it was very high resolution imagery, and that was probably our highest memory intensive data that we've ever received.
The points, lines, and polygons that we use on a daily basis, there's a lot of it. But in terms of file size, it's not huge. It's nothing like aerial imagery. The aerial imagery that you see on the GeoPortal, that's streaming from an external source. It's like Google when you open up Google Earth and you see all that imagery and you can zoom in and see your house, that's not being stored on our servers.
We're pulling that in from Esri. They're our source of our base maps, our imagery, and our other base maps that we have available.
Tell us more about ESRI.
Environmental Systems Research Institute is what ESRI stands for. They started in 1969, and they were privately owned still by one man, Jack Dangerman, who is the president of ESRI. The majority of GIS users in the world use ESRI products. In fact, we just got back from the ESRI conference two weeks ago. There were some really exciting things and tools and technologies that we'll be able to deploy here at Tri-State.
There's a lot happening in the reality data world where reality mapping is a term. It's a buzzword right now in the GIS industry, and it's a catch-all term for aerial imagery that's collected either by fixed wing helicopter, or vehicle on the ground. And it incorporates a lot of point cloud data that's collected through LIDAR sensors and three d mapping. You take all those different types of data. Esri's kind of rolled that up into a reality mapping platform.
We're really looking closely at how we can leverage those technologies. Because the idea is to quickly deploy something like a drone and have that information available to our end users.
Is that streaming so it would be more up to date imagery, or is it still older? Because if it's maintenance work over time, that data visual data won't be as useful as it is right when it's taken.
But with drone technology, you can go out and fly it again. So versus the data I was mentioning earlier about our LiDAR project from ten years ago, it took two summers or three summers to collect all that information, all that LiDAR data and that imagery because you have to work with landowners. You're flying over arms and people's homes, and you have to be cognizant of that, you have to plan that. There's a lot of fieldwork that goes into it. With a drone, it's a little bit more efficient to collect that information and not disturb landowners and that kind of thing.
Can you send the route along our transmission structures to the drone to fly along a designated path?
Oh, yeah. That's what the technology does. You have to plan your flight path before you go out.
So these have been some great examples of applications you all have built. Are there other case studies you wanna highlight?
We got involved in helping to refine our eight one one underground asset layers. We do have underground assets, especially around our substations, and we have several transmission lines that go underground. Each state maintains their own eight one one entity. We've helped refine that data because it was originally from section township range. They were very large areas, we had our field folks getting calls that somebody was digging in near one of our assets, but it was nowhere near one of our assets.
It involved a lot of our telecom maintenance folks because that's where a lot of our infrastructure is underground. And we submitted that data and replaced the old data from the eight one one, so that way they weren't getting calls and going on wild goose chases. Once we deployed that, that reduced the number of calls they got. Another example, we're working with the asset management team and wildfire mitigation specialists in making sure that we have data on our high risk lines. So they're gonna get satellite imagery, and we're gonna get that information and put that into GIS so that gets synced up with our mobile application field maps, and our folks in the field will be able to see where there's potential vegetation issues along the lines, and they can address it.
That's gonna really enhance how we manage our vegetation projects and where our risks are.
What do the layers of those maps look like?
The layers for the vegetation management? So satellite imagery is called a raster dataset, and then the contractor is taking that data from the satellite and turning it into a polygon for us, which is a vector layer. It's a point lines or polygons or vector layer. We're then gonna ingest those layers into our system, and they'll be ranked. Here's a high level of importance area for vegetation that looks like it's on a slope or it's too close to the transmission line.
So we'll color code those red being very high area of concern to green where there's no area of concern.
Are you able to track the types of vegetation too in those maps?
Coming from the satellite, there is some algorithms that the contractors use. There's a lot of people who just specialize in taking color signatures and interpolating what that color signature for that type of leaf is. We're not necessarily doing that on this project. We're really more concerned over encroachment, whether it's a pine tree or a different type of tree. It doesn't matter to us. It's just too close to our line.
Per project, you're making a custom map for everything. Right?
Yeah. We try to standardize the way our maps look, but every discipline is gonna have something custom to. Wildfire mitigation is very focused on vegetation. And maintenance folks, when they do inspections, that's gonna be more focused on the structures. Just different content and different layers in their applications and on their maps.
A lot of the job seems like it's making sure that you have all the data and that all of it is up to date as possible. Mhmm. How long does it actually take to make an application or make the map?
The application and the map are getting much easier to make. The biggest struggle is the data, because a lot of our data comes from external sources. A lot of times, we have to rely on our end users to tell us, hey. That doesn't look right. And a good example too would be the federal layers that we deploy for federal lands.
That's something that we downloaded and have sitting on our servers now. And everybody relies on it, but it it's only as good as we update it. When we have a project, we need ownership information to reach out to landowners and coordinate tracking either acquisitions or just permission to enter the survey on their property. It's a struggle to try to keep it refreshed all at once, so we have to do it on a project by project basis.
I feel like my comparison for that is when you go into Google Maps and you see the picture of your house, but there's a car parked and you're driving, that's Yep. Not your feels like just being able to trust your data is a huge part of it.
Yeah. As soon as you download something from an external source, keeping all that data fresh is a challenge. And sometimes it's not practical. We just prioritize it based off of project need.
So what are some of the new projects your team has going that you're excited about?
I'm working with Mike Houglum's group on it right now. The idea is to get a public facing map out there that they can just go to. They don't have to log in to anything. They can go and just see our service territory and our fire posture for the day, because we do send that out on a daily basis internally. The idea is to say, hey, we have a red flag warning day in this part of the service territory.
Go to the map and check it out. That's going to be really exciting because it's a milestone because we've never done anything externally. Most of our GIS is an internal system. We are really looking forward into developing more of that situational awareness type application to support wildfire mitigation and emergency response. That's what I was talking about with the new technology coming out of ESRI that we're gonna be able to leverage and be able to get applications out there that take live data like storm tracking and get that out and into the hands of our operations folks.
I think there's a lot we can do with situational awareness mapping and reality mapping. That's some stuff that we're really focused on right now.
At Tri-State, we're always assessing where are the risks or what risks do we need to be looking at. And it feels like the work you're doing is taking all of this risk data and making it visual so you can pinpoint, here's where we need to be focused or that's what we need
to be looking at next. Giving people a single platform to go and look at it spatially is the key.
Tri-State has such a huge service territory. How do you begin to plan without being able to narrow down this data? How do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? So it actually enables people to do their work. They're able to pinpoint targets and Yeah. Hack away at it.
Yeah. That's really what GIS does. It's a great tool for a company, an organization like Tri-State to deploy. And I think we can provide our members with some more value to the system that we've built and we've been maintaining for over fifteen years. And I think it's only gonna grow and provide much more value across the organization as we move forward.
Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned you've been at Tri-State for fifteen years and on the GIS side the whole time. What is the draw for you? What keeps your job interesting?
I have to say the number one thing that keeps me moving at Tri-State and keeps me excited about what we're doing is my team. I've been around the industry or different industries before coming to Tri State fifteen years, and I'm just super excited about the team that I've helped build. And now I'm leading that team. It's they're just a great group of professionals that have really solid background in geospatial technology and geosciences, and they're a pleasure to work with. Every day, we're asked to do something that we've haven't done before.
It's just a constant stream of new requests and new challenges. It's exciting for somebody like me who's been around the industry and worked in GIS and different industries to come here and find a home at Tri-State and just be challenged on a constant daily basis and be able to see the value that we're providing the company.
Well, it feels like so many of the things your team is working on, it serves to make other jobs more efficient, simpler.
It's a good feeling when you go home and you feel like you've made a difference in somebody's daily work.
Thanks for tuning in to Western Watts. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or on our website at tristate.coop/wwpod. We'll catch you next time.