West Virginia statewide addressing and mapping program
The State of West Virginia needed to establish city-style addresses in large areas of the state for E-911 service. The primary goal of E-911 addressing was to link each telephone number to a permanent, unique address that accurately identifies where a caller is physically located.
Statewide E-911 addressing and mapping is a long and complex effort, requiring the collaborative long-term efforts of the state, counties, communities, U.S. Postal Service, telephone companies, and contractors. Because of this, only a handful of states in the United States have undertaken statewide E-911 addressing and mapping projects. Statewide addressing and mapping projects involve not only technical expertise, but also proven organizational and management skills.
Challenge
This project was a challenge for the mostly rural state, because most of the state’s city-style addresses are found in 234 incorporated municipalities. Two-thirds of the state’s 1,800,000 residents living in hundreds of unincorporated places have only rural route mailing addresses or post office box numbers. Because of this, it is estimated that the state will need to create approximately 700,000 city-style addresses through this project.
West Virginia needed a Project Manager that could design the system and to manage its construction, orchestrating the activities of two prime contractors (one for mapping and one for addressing). The project manager also needed to serve as liaison with all project stakeholders and the West Virginia Statewide Addressing and Mapping Board.
Solution
On this project, Lucerne teamed up with Michael Baker Jr., Inc., of Charleston, West Virginia. Dr. Terry Keating served as overall Project Manager and directed the team’s activities, interfaced with the State Board, and provided lead expertise for all aspects of statewide mapping, addressing, quality assurance, and system designs. Michael Baker brought extended capabilities in engineering, GIS and project management.
In February 2003, the WVSAMB awarded a contract to develop statewide digital orthoimagery created from ground controlled aerial photography. The digital orthoimagery is of two-foot ground resolution in 24-bit true color and was collected during the late winter/early spring of 2003. The contract also included developing planimetric layers at the scale of 1 inch to 400 feet (1:4800), conforming to the positional accuracy standards established by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) for 1 inch to 400 feet (1:4800) scale maps. The planimetric layers include: road centerlines, major driveway centerlines, railroad centerlines, overpasses, bridges and tunnels, building points, major structure polygons, hydrography, and dams and spillways.
The addressing vendor then developed a comprehensive set of support services for all participating counties and municipalities to complete statewide 9-1-1 city-type addressing and development of related telephone company databases. These services included formatting and attributing spatial planimetric files, creating 9-1-1 addresses, linking old-to-new addresses, developing address conversion materials for the USPS, developing MSAG files, providing materials for updating telephone subscriber addresses with local telephone exchange carriers, and creating tabular and spatial Emergency Service Zone files.
Client
The West Virginia Legislature created the West Virginia Statewide Addressing and Mapping Board (WVSAMB) in 2001. The Board is charged with developing an integrated addressing and photogrammetric base mapping system for the entire State of West Virginia. The system includes aerial photography, digital maps and a Geographic Information System (GIS) that will interface with and contribute to the needs of several state stakeholders including: county and municipal Enhanced 9-1-1 services, state and local government agencies, telephone companies, United States Postal Service (USPS), and utility systems, with a special focus on public safety and emergency response.
Results
West Virginia will be the first state in the nation to have statewide high-resolution elevation coverage as part of the U.S. Geological Survey’s 1/9th arc-second National Elevation Data product.
West Virginia will have one of the most consistent and spatially accurate road centerline databases in the nation as part of the Census Bureau’s TIGER map modernization program.
West Virginia has released 2-foot pixel, natural color orthophotos for the entire State, accessible through FTP download and through Web Map Services.
West Virginia will be one of the first states to have completed digital flood insurance rate map (DFIRM) coverage as part of FEMA’s nationwide map modernization project.
West Virginia will be one of the first states to have completed statewide addressing and mapping files as part of the Statewide Addressing and Mapping Project.
West Virginia has launched a geospatial public portal, MapWVgov, for online mapping resources.
Services
