Digital Data Collection for Stormwater Inspections

The City of Carson, California sought an efficient way to conduct storm water inspections at permitted businesses within City limits on a compressed schedule as part of their MS4 permit requirements. Partnering with GHD, the City was able to gain efficiencies in the following areas: Progress reporting QA/QC of field data during collection Linking field photos with inspection forms Digital data entry of previous hand-written field forms Scheduling follow-up inspections Tabular data upload to regulatory database The efficiencies translate into faster progress of over 1100 inspections, transparency on progress and data quality for all team members, and easier upload to compliance databases. Coupling these tools with GHD's comprehensive training on what to ask and look for in the field during inspections and what might indicate an illicit discharge or connection provided a comprehensive package and robust support team for the City of Carson. Purpose: We will be presenting the successful workflow using Esri's ArcGIS Online and mobile apps to show how the City accelerated a team of new storm water inspectors and new adopters of Esri mobile apps into an efficient and seamless program of storm water compliance. Custom scripting within pop-ups allowed inspectors to benefit from the map aspect of Collector and ease of data entry with Survey123. Dashboards and web apps in the Online environment allowed for concurrent review of field data in real time, and at-a-glance progress for program managers. Benefits of Presentation: This project is an excellent example of a ground-up program roll-out of first-time inspectors using Esri's ArcGIS Online and mobile tools. It demonstrates how quickly and easily storm water inspections and reporting can be prepared, packaged and delivered in a way to get a team started and inspections completed with maximum transparency. Status of Completion/Conclusions: At the time of submittal, the training, data preparation, and tool development described above is complete. Inspections have started and are scheduled to be completed and data uploaded to the regulatory database in the first quarter of 2022. We expect the project will be entirely complete, with time for reflection, before the June conference date. Originality: Esri offers many online tools that can be designed to fit the need of any project. We took this one step further to apply custom scripting within the mobile apps to leverage the advantages of both Collector and Survey123. The way we have combined the building blocks provided by Esri created a custom fit to this project and would fit any organization who is starting from square-one with their storm water inspections required through their NPDES permit, or who is looking for a more streamlined and repeatable approach to their inspection data management.