High Winds Mean High Time for GIS Technology

09 June 2009, 11:19am

Redlands, California — June 9, 2009 — Living in the Kite Capital of the World means lovely Saturday afternoons for most residents of Lincoln County, Oregon. However, for utility crews, it means extensive efforts to keep the power flowing despite outrageous winds that send trees crashing into electric lines.

Central Lincoln People’s Utility District found a faster way to prevent and fix such outages with vegetation and outage management based on geographic information system (GIS) technology from ESRI. The utility serves approximately 38,000 customers along the central Oregon coast—a strip 100 miles long and 2 miles wide.

“With extreme winds, a lot of our transmission and distribution lines are susceptible to trees,” said Neal Myers, GIS supervisor for Central Lincoln People’s Utility District. “Through GIS, we are able to link our voice recognition system with customer information. When we get an outage call, we are able to quickly create a work order and deploy field crews directly to the trouble areas.”

Central Lincoln recently gained greater access to GIS technology by joining ESRI’s Small Utility Enterprise License Agreement (SU-ELA) program, designed to make GIS more affordable for utilities in the United States with 100,000 meters/connections or fewer. Through the SU-ELA program, utilities are assured unlimited deployments of ESRI’s ArcGIS platform over a three-year term. Additional program benefits include maintenance and support for products, staff training, and passes to ESRI’s International User Conference.

At the heart of the SU-ELA program is ESRI’s ArcGIS software, an open, scalable, and interoperable platform that provides a complete system to create, serve, and use geographic information. An enterprise GIS, based on ArcGIS technology, benefits designers, analysts, decision makers, field staff, and customers through mobile, Web server, and desktop applications.

ESRI SU-ELA program and podcast

Geo: International