Beam it down! RFO GIS technician Aaron Davis prepares a high-definition, digital graphic representation of the New Orleans debris and demolition field. LA-RFO Photo by George Marcec. Back to Features

GIS team gets their direction from Outer Space
By Dave Harris, public affairs specialist, Louisiana Recovery Field Office 

NEW ORLEANS, LA ... Outer space doesn’t have an everyday impact on the typical worker at the Louisiana Recovery Field Office, but Kyle Gaston’s job essentially beams him up through all the space debris to the orbiting satellites to help him get his bearings.

The Army Corps of Engineers’ debris and demolition mission looks to Kyle to pinpoint properties and create maps that crews use to accurately locate the houses identified for demolition or debris, including saltwater-killed trees needing removal.

Kyle is “the GIS guy” and manages the Geographic Information System tasks for the RFO. He explained that GIS is the overall data framework and that GPS – Global Positioning System that people use to plot a location or get directions – is one of the many parts of GIS.

RFO crews, for example, can take their GPS devices to a property needing demolition. The GPS unit takes readings and establishes coordinates for each property. Back at the office, Kyle downloads that data and makes maps showing the location of the properties, so that other crews can find them and complete the demolitions.

GIS, Kyle says, produces more than a neat, squared-up map pointing up for north. “GIS produces a map that is skewed or turned to be geographically correct, in all different projections, depending on where you are in the world.”

The future of GIS at the RFO, he says, includes setting up a “geo-database” that can include the property location, where the owner is living now, and county-, state- or city-provided information, such as tax base input. 

Here at the RFO, Kyle describes himself as a “fancy cartographer,” and he is affectionately called “Map Daddy.”

He says, “The staff brings satellite-identified coordinates to me to find out whether plots or points are those in Sector 1 or Sector 2.”

Other tasks would include something as simple as asking for a map of where all the zip codes are.

Kyle, whose home is in Omaha, Neb., earned a bachelor’s degree in geography with a minor in GIS. He works for a contractor, Applied Data Consultants, who provides a GIS geographic service center help desk for the Corps’ Omaha District and separate services for the Real Estate Division producing property tract maps for land transfers.

He says that early-on in the RFO mission, “there was a room full of GIS people at the RFO of both contractors and Corps employees. As the mission winds down, it gets harder to fill the job with regular employees. That’s why we are contracted to fill the gap.”

Kyle says typically his best days here are “the days after I make a map and the staff talks about the map in a PowerPoint presentation - knowing it got used and somebody actually understands it.”