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Stormy Weather
BEFORE: Inaccurate red outlines
AFTER: Accurate pink outlines
Streets and parking lots do more than cover the ground, they affect an area's drainage. When it rains, all that water has to go somewhere. In places like Fort Wayne, that somewhere is the local overflow system. The City uses tax dollars to maintain and improve it, and charges based on a property's "impervious surfaces." So it's important to know how much pavement there is on properties around the city. The question is, how do you get that information without going out and measuring each parking lot? And once you know, how do you keep it current?
A coalition of public and private partners had helped Indiana acquire statewide orthophotography - digital aerial photography - for the first time. Local governments received 1-foot resolution photography for free. For Fort Wayne, this meant not having to obtain the data themselves for another three years, a savings of about $100,000. Once they had it, they were able to find, mark, and measure all the impervious surfaces in the city over one summer.