By Daniel Nash
The Courier-Herald
There may not be any cards available for National Geographic Information Systems Day, but the Bonney Lake Community Development Department at least offered up a cake.
The cake frosting was printed from street and zoning maps of the city on one half, with a “Happy GIS Day!” picture of the globe on the other half.
Geography Awareness Week is sponsored by the National Geographic Society and National GIS Day was celebrated on the Wednesday (Nov. 18) of Geography Awareness Week. National GIS Day spotlights the practice of Geographic Information Systems.
Geographic Information Systems, or GIS, is the use of computers and technology to track information on maps. Governments, businesses and non-governmental organizations all use GIS’s broad range of applications to do everything from planning building locations to tracking crime data.
Bonney Lake accomplishes its GIS work using a subscription to Pierce County’s GIS program. The subscription allows the city access to software developed by industry leader ESRI, and data from the county’s extensive database.
Allan Catanzaro, a GIS analyst for the city of Bonney Lake’s Community Development Department, has worked in the geography field for nearly a quarter century.
He obtained both his bachelor’s and master’s degree in geography from UCLA. His partner in Bonney Lake’s GIS efforts is Adam Kwakenot, a recent graduate of Green River Community College with his degree in forestry.
Kwakenot was attracted to a GIS career because it affords him the opportunity to indulge dual interests. He loves the outdoors, but he also spends free time working with computers, whether building them, playing games or visiting conventions for computer and gaming culture.
Community Develop-ment’s current project has Kwakenot in the field collecting data on the city’s storm water pathways, a project that is about 75 percent completed, he said.
He spends seven hours of his workday walking the streets of Bonney Lake with a GPS antenna and handheld computer looking for catch basins, the metal grates built into the asphalt, and their branching pipes.
Kwakenot demonstrated on the catch basin just outside of the City Hall Annex, where Community Development is located. Standing on top of the grate, he activated his antenna.
Within moments, the antenna triangulated his position by communicating with three GPS satellites orbiting the earth. Then he entered information about the basin, such as its depth, into his hand-held unit.
From there he used the antennae to “draw” the pathways of pipes leading from the basin. This basin only had one leading to a fenced pond several feet away. He marked the beginning and end points of the pipe with the antenna.
Back in his cubicle, Kwakenot removed the data card containing the SHP files from his handheld and inserted it to his computer’s card reader. Within minutes, he was able to display the data he had gathered on a satellite picture of the annex.
The location of the grate and pipe were drawn onto the map just a foot off from their actual location, an inaccuracy Kwakenot was able to correct in the program.
“It’s amazing that we have access to a technology that allows us to calculate the location of something within a foot of accuracy,” Catanzaro said. “If we were doing this from as-builts (manually drawn engineers’ maps created before GIS) we might have the possibility of 100 feet of inaccuracy. This allows us to find those mistakes right away and make the information 100 percent accurate.”
GIS allows a necessary part of city management to become even more effective, Catanzaro said.
“Mapping and the classic art of cartography are entirely incorporated into GIS, except the mapping and symbolization are all done in software programs on hi-tech computers,” he said. “That makes it a very powerful tool for local government. It’s a very powerful form of media, because we’ll always need maps. Maps have been around as long as people have.”
Various maps of Bonney Lake decorate the walls of the annex. Everywhere one looks, a map. And more are produced by the moment: Steve Willardson, the transportation supervisor, cuts out a newly printed map of priority streets for snow and ice plowing. Before GIS was introduced to the department, snow and ice maps were street maps with highlighter on them, Willardson said.
Though Catanzaro and Kwakenot are based out of Community Development, they frequently work with other departments, such as Public Safety and the Sumner and White River school districts. The highlight of this year’s work was a full map of billing information for utilities, submitted to Pierce County.
“Not only does the city need several types of different maps, those maps constantly need to be updated,” Catanzaro said. “This is information that used to be in spreadsheets, but when something is in that format it just can’t be easily visualized.
“We use computers and technology, yes, but this is a very human thing. We are taking hard data and turning it into something anyone can see and understand.”
