Applications for Road Closures and Routing and Common Operating Picture for the I- 35W Bridge Collapse

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1 State of Minnesota Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) in partnership with the City of Minneapolis and Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) Applications for Road Closures and Routing and Common Operating Picture for the I- 35W Bridge Collapse 2008 NASCIO Recognition Award Nomination Category 6: Digital Government: Government to Government (G to G)

2 I. Executive Summary At 6:05 p.m. on Wednesday August 1, 2007, the Interstate 35W bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed and fell into the water. Thirteen people were killed and more than 100 people were injured. First responders quickly arrived at the site and Emergency Operation Centers were activated. Traffic quickly became snarled as a primary travel corridor was no longer available. In addition, rescue operations closed many major streets surrounding the site. City, regional, and state managers needed solutions for situational awareness and a means to address the problem of keeping goods, services, and people moving around the site and keeping businesses open. With a major traffic corridor now unavailable, people would need to find new routes to get into, out of, and around the city, routes that would circumnavigate the collapse site and surrounding area. Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), a leading GIS vendor, contacted both City of Minneapolis and Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) staff to see where it might assist in responding to the incident. The City of Minneapolis led a discussion that focused on the need to quickly publish incident site information to city staff and responders. Additionally, there was a need to communicate to the public how the bridge collapse would impact their transportation needs and how to find route information that could direct them from their location to specified destinations within the greater Twin Cities area. ESRI quickly provided a team of developers. Some members focused on creating a Common Operating Picture (COP) that could be used by incident command for situational awareness. Other team members put their efforts toward a road closure and routing application that would allow staff from multiple agencies (e.g., the City of Minneapolis and Mn/DOT) to input specific up-to-date information about which state, county and city streets were closed to traffic, which streets were serving as primary detour routes, and which streets were going to have expedited traffic flow. In addition, the application needed to integrate all of that data into a smart routing system for citizens to use. The outcome of the efforts provided the incident command team with an easy-to-use tool that assisted with effective communication of site information to the chain of command and multiple responding agencies, and provided a mechanism for collaborative planning of operations. The public also significantly benefited by having a user-friendly website to find new routes that circumnavigate the bridge site and surrounding area.

3 II. Description Team Members Mn/DOT Sonia Dickerson, John Harrison, Joella Givens, Charlie McCarty, Peter Morey, Dan Ross, Fred Sasse City of Minneapolis - James Murphy, Jon Obermoller, John Janzen, Mark Benishek, Steve Misterek,, Paul Weinberger, Paul Cameron, Eero Kilkson, Grant Johnson, Debra Parker, Lynn Willenbring ESRI - Frank Baxter, Tom Bushey, Evan Marshall, James Neild, Mansour Raad, Jim Westman, Tom Kreykes, Tom Swanson Business Problem With the collapse of the I-35W Bridge, a primary travel corridor was unavailable to the motoring public. There was a need during and after the response to keep businesses near the site open and to keep goods, services and people moving through the City of Minneapolis and around the site. Along with the need to keep motorists and commerce moving, there was a need to provide incident command and response teams and recovery staff from multiple agencies with consistent, clear and effective communication during the days and weeks following the event. Solution Road Closure and Routing With agency oversight, Mansour Raad, a senior software architect with ESRI, quickly put together a multi-faceted Web application that features a public-facing Web page and an administrative Web page. The administrative Web page allowed administrators from collaborating agencies (e.g., City of Minneapolis and Mn/DOT) to use an interactive map viewer showing roads, streets and other geographic information to define barrier locations for street closures. The tools allowed barriers to be changed in response to the needs identified by incident command during recovery and cleanup efforts. For example, a street that was closed in the morning might be reopened in the afternoon and another street closed, so a commuter's route to work could be very different from the return route. Once posted, the barrier data was dynamic; therefore, routing changes were immediately available on the public-facing Web page.

4 Using the public-facing website, citizens were able to create personalized routes by either entering an address or clicking start and end points on the map. A route was instantly calculated and drawn on the map. The user could print out the route with turn-by-turn directions and take it on the road. Road closures due to Flooding Less than three weeks after the bridge collapse, extensive flooding occurred in southeast Minnesota. The road closure and routing application was again put to use by Mn/DOT to assist with moving response personnel and citizens around the badly flooded and heavily damaged roads in southeast Minnesota. Mn/DOT staff contacted multiple agencies, including county and city staff, to gather road damage and closure information and integrate it into a single system for all agencies to use. Barriers were entered into the system on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis as information became available. A hard copy map also was produced and made available for those responding in the field. This application was developed in August 2007 and is still available today ( Common Operating Picture (COP) To assist in the effort to provide incident command and response and recovery personnel from multiple agencies with clear and consistent communications, a second Web application was developed with agency oversight and collaboration. The Common Operating Picture (COP) facilitates collaborative planning of operations and assists all levels of incident command to achieve situational awareness. This visual application allowed incident commanders to quickly visualize and communicate locations for placement of equipment, security checkpoints, staff, security fence locations, street closures, trail closures, staging areas and overall site delineation. Initially the Web application was hosted at the City of Minneapolis. The Website was transitioned to Mn/DOT after the first week.

5 The COP created for the I- 35W bridge collapse was available for the response and recovery period (August 2 to September 15, 2007) and is no longer available online. However, its effectiveness during the bridge collapse response and recovery has prompted the Governor s Council for GIS Emergency Preparedness Committee to recommend the use of a common operating tool for use in the State s Emergency Operations Center. The tools that were created were Web-based and require no plug-ins or special licensing. The road closure and routing application is composed of two 24/7 service components, a public-facing trip planning Web service component, and a secured road closing Web service component. Both components are hosted by ESRI as ArcWeb Services. In order to promote the effectiveness of the solutions provided, Mn/DOT and City of Minneapolis staff have been sharing successes and identifying opportunities for future use of the tools within and outside of their respective organizations. III. Significance of the project to the improvement of the operation of government The information needs arising from the I-35W bridge collapse presented an opportunity for the collaborative development of two Web applications that allowed multiple agencies to input and share information (applying the principle of build it once and use it many times ). Both Mn/DOT and the City of Minneapolis could manage and report road closures on the streets they were responsible for and share the information across agencies. The public benefited by having access to a single map service to access customized travel routes that could direct them from their location to specified destinations within the greater Twin Cities area. Less than three weeks after the bridge collapse, during the severe flooding in southeast Minnesota, the road closure and routing tool was again used by multiple agencies to provide important road information to responding agencies and citizens. The application is still in operation today for governments and citizens to use in circumnavigating road closures.

6 As command of the collapse site was transferred to Mn/DOT, the agency also took over responsibility of the COP Web application. Data and components of the common operating picture hosted in Minneapolis were provided to Mn/DOT, where they were incorporated into an existing Web-map template. This allowed for quick migration of the application with no interruption of service to incident command working at the bridge collapse site. The website also maintained the look and feel of the application as it was originally built. IV. Benefit of the Project The collaborative efforts that occurred in response to the I-35W bridge collapse provided many benefits. Within a day, the development of the Common Operating Picture gave incident command and responders easy-to-use tools for providing situational awareness. Incident commanders were able to present response and recovery personnel from multiple agencies with consistent, clear and effective communication during the days and weeks following the bridge collapse. The tool was effectively used in facilitating collaborative planning and in obtaining information about, and assigning resources to, specific locations at the bridge site. The road closure and routing tools that were developed enabled citizens to easily see on a map which routes were open. Citizens could create personalized routes that could direct them from their location to specified destinations within the greater Twin Cities area. Traffic continues to move smoothly around this bridge site today. Within a day and a half, two applications were available for use by multiple agencies, providing critical information about activities at and around the bridge collapse site. In addition, the tools allowed for the continued movement of goods, services and people to or around the bridge site as needed. Benefits far outweighed the costs for the effort. In fact, there were no direct costs to the participating agencies for putting the two important applications together. ESRI covered the costs for development and hosting of the road closure and routing application and initial development cost for the COP application. Minimal staff costs were incurred to set up hosting of the COP at the City of Minneapolis and again later at Mn/DOT. Based on the huge benefits experienced from the road closure and routing application during the I- 35W bridge collapse and southeast Minnesota floods, Mn/DOT and other agencies are looking at where else the tools could be efficiently applied in preparation for and during other emergency planning and operations. As with the two events described above, future use of these tools would provide multiple agencies with a common set of tools and allow for significant saving of resources.