NYU Teams with GISMO on the Unification for Underground Resilience Measures Project (UNUM)
Following the attack on the World Trade Center GISMO leadership, including UNUM senior personnel Alan Leidner and Wendy Dorf, played an active role asking its members to volunteer mapping services. In all, more than 75 GIS technicians from city, state, and federal agencies, and from colleges and the private sector worked 24/7 for 6 weeks to support search and rescue operations, find locations for construction cranes, identify damage to underground infrastructure, fight underground fires, and locate airplane debris.
Although many lessons were learned, the key insight was that spatially enabled and interoperable data is essential for disaster preparedness and response. Since then, NYC’s enterprise GIS system has matured – supporting an ever-expanding set of use cases. However, little progress has been made on underground infrastructure mapping due to data sharing and security issues.
The UNUM project, supported by $1.5M in grants from the National Science Foundation was initiated to remedy this problem. Led by Professor Debra Laefer and Professor Rae Zimmerman and supported by Alan Leidner and Wendy Dorf from GISMO, the purpose of this project has been to examine how underground utility data in NYC could be developed, integrated and made interoperable in support of use cases that included safe excavations, more efficient capital construction, improved emergency and disaster planning and response; and more effective infrastructure maintenance and management. Representatives of various NYC agencies, utilities and UNUM’s members have worked ceaselessly and enthusiastically towards this goal through workshops and related events over the past 3 years.
Read Bloomberg.com article Nobody Knows What Lies Beneath New York City (August 10, 2017), featuring Alan Leidner and Wendy Dorf of GISMO, on our early efforts leading to the UNUM and MUDDI collaborations.