One aspect of environmental surveying often overlooked when considering the use of geographical information systems (GIS) is indoor facility assessments. Typically the domain of facilities management personnel or plant engineering departments with CAD departments, indoor environmental surveys for contaminants such as lead based paint and asbestos could be greatly enhanced by using GIS. This article describes how a PC-based GIS was used to capture and report on data for an asbestos survey of a +2,500,000 square foot office complex, reducing remediation costs by over 50 percent.
      When you think of it, to a GIS, a hot water pipe in a building is no different from an oil pipeline, a stream or highway running through a city. It is just a matter of scale and scale is one of the easiest things to change in a GIS.
      I have long been an advocate of taking technology and putting it in the hands of the people that collect the data in the first place, namely the field technicians. In the environmental arena the level of technology now directly available to the field investigator is staggering. With the recent availability of portable computers and PC-based GIS software, as well as digital cameras and GPS receiver modules, digital in-field data recording is now becoming a requirement of many industries. Several value added resellers (VARs) have already developed integrated hardware and software packages to support this growing need.
      As with anything else, technology is only as good as the client who is willing to pay for it. There must be economic (or political) value to using one technology over another. Finding the appropriate client base is critical to success in any marketing venture. For GIS, one potentially overlooked area is facilities management people who deal with building maintenance and safety. One of the most feared words a building manager could hear is asbestos, followed closely by lead based paint. These issues are two of the most difficult environmental problems to quantify from an engineering standpoint. Environmental regulations are naturally strict, and clean-up or remediation costs can quickly outstrip all available resources of even large corporations.
      A typical response to the presence of asbestos containing material (ACM) in a building, by the building manager and with the full concurrence of the remediation contractor, would be to remove all suspected insulation and replace it with non-ACM insulation. This option may increase the overall cost of cleanup because it assumes all the insulation to have ACM. In many instances, more material is removed and handled as hazardous waste than is sometimes necessary resulting in unnecessarily high clean-up costs. Certainly, there are instances, say small problem areas where the "all at once" option may be more cost efficient, but for larger office buildings or facilities, a more precise assessment of the problem can result in significant cost clean-up savings. To demonstrate that this technology exists and works, I would like to describe a less than typical field survey project which utilized some of these technologies.

The Problem
A large commercial office complex had been found to contain asbestos during a preliminary survey. Roughly two-thirds of the complex was built before 1980. The third built after 1980 does not contain ACM. Over 2,500 people work in the complex and the additional field surveys and remediation efforts would be very disruptive. The problem is to find a way to completely assess the extent of the problem in a cost effective manner, and to present remediation options based on confirmed data and not on supposition. This project was to include the formulation of an operations and management (O&M) plan for the company to track and manage ACM within the complex.

The Approach
While trying to come up with a way to visualize the results of the first survey, GIS was initially sought as a cartographic repository of paper floor plans and maps of sampling locations. It was not until the capabilities of GIS were evaluated that it became clear that GIS could perform the majority of the data gathering and reporting functions of the survey. However, the GIS would require that the survey be performed in a totally different manner. The way asbestos surveys have been performed previously was to go into a room, sample a material type and categorize all similar materials in the room based on the results of those samples. In essence, a single positive result in a room would justify classifying the entire room as positive and requiring extensive cleanup. This approach did not take into consideration that different types of systems existed in that room which may or may not have been installed at the same time using the same materials, or that the systems extended through walls, floor and ceilings into other rooms. The result is a very conservative assessment of suspected ACM which carries with it a very expensive cleanup cost.
      The GIS made it possible to assess contamination not merely by room, but by functional system. That is to say a particular type of plumbing line or air conditioning system could be evaluated separately for an entire floor or building. Limits could be placed on the extent of the ACM based on the results of additional samples collected at locations selected when reviewing the data in the GIS. The GIS therefore moves from the back of the project, where it was simply a reporting tool, to the front of the project to serve as a planning tool and to the middle of the project as a data gathering tool. The GIS and GIS specialist became key members of the asbestos survey team and changed the way the survey team sampled and collected the data.

Integration to Existing Data Resources
The previous survey relied solely on paper floorplans or CAD drawings to record sampling locations and assess coverage for an area. The paper maps now had to be integrated into GIS to make the data usable for systems analysis. If floorplan files are maintained in a CAD or GIS system, they can usually be imported into other systems. If the floorplans are not in a digital format, scanning and digitization would be required which will add to the overall cost of the survey. [Note: the value to the client of now having digital floorplans would extend beyond the ACM survey.]
      It is important to determine all the different formats of the digital data to be used in the survey and confirm that the GIS selected can accurately import (and export if necessary) the required formats. In the case of this survey, digital files of the basic floorplans were available in the .DGN format of Intergraph. Although architectural layers were present, none of the engineering layers (pipes and ductwork) were in digital format. The availability of the .DGN files was key to accurately digitizing plumbing and HVAC systems over the basic architectural floorplans.
      While paper copies of plumbing and HVAC layers were available, it was determined that these engineering drawings were rarely precise and accurate representations of field conditions. Even as-built drawings were found to be lacking and digitizing by hand, in the field, was the only way to accurately record the locations of the different systems.

Changes in Approach
Field digitization was an extremely tedious and time consuming effort and further points to changes in the way this asbestos survey had to be performed. Previously, the field survey would be very brief, a few days or weeks. Samples would be collected from all over the facility and reference marks made on the paper maps. When it came time to write the report, there would be extensive post-processing of the data and analytical results. This process is completely reversed when using the GIS. The field survey now consumes the bulk of the project time and reporting takes only a few days.
      One benefit of using GIS is that data can be available for review almost instantaneously. As analytical results on the samples come in, they can be quickly incorporated and used to assess where additional samples may be needed to best define the extent of ACM and hopefully reduce the amount of ACM to remediate. It was very dramatic to see the linear feet of suspected ACM insulation drop with the addition of a few more sample results. This could only be done with control of data at the functional system level and not simply by room.

The Survey Design
To summarize, a field survey was performed within an office building complex comprising some 12 building units and 13 floors including parking garages. This office complex was staffed by over 2,500 people working various shifts. Asbestos containing material was found in the older buildings of the complex in several different forms: floor tiles, glues and sealants, insulation wrap and pipe hanger pads. The project's goal was to determine the extent of ACM contamination in the older parts of the facility and develop an O&M plan to assist the company to manage the ACM problem.
      The survey was to be comprehensive. There were to be no ACM surprises identified at a later date. Furthermore, the normal work flow of the complex was not to be affected by the survey. Offices occupied during the day would be surveyed at night. The project was to be completed in six months and the deliverable was to include electronic databases and a GIS installed on their computer system. The resources available included: digital floorplans, paper technical drawings, access to plant engineers and support staff.
      The first step was to generate base maps in GIS using the available .DGN files. At the time of the survey and for various technical reasons including the ability to import and export two-dimensional .DGN files, the GIS selected was the DOS version of the Caliper Corporation product line, GISPlus v.2.1. This was later replaced with their MS Windows product, Maptitude 3.0. Data translation was complicated only by the large number of .DGN files that needed to be processed.
      Following a meeting with the facility engineers it was determined that as many as 150 different functional systems could be identified on the mechanical drawings. Furthermore there were potentially 14 different types of material that could contain ACM. The matrix became further complicated when it had to account for 13 floors, 12 buildings and hundreds of individual rooms. The survey had to make sure each type of systems was adequately sampled for the different media that existed on a floor. The GIS would therefore be required to show the extent of a system on a floor, across buildings, and be able to identify the media present and the location of every sample taken and analyzed.

Field Work
At this point, the base maps had been translated or digitized and the database structure populated. The next step was to begin surveying each room in each building by floor and recording the location and attributes of each insulated pipe and duct in the complex. This involved removing ceiling tiles, working in crawl spaces, on catwalks, on ladders, in hydraulic lifts and carrying a laptop computer with the GIS and hand digitizing each system. The area covered by the survey was equal to about 85 football fields. Whenever a sample was collected, the spot was marked with a number and a picture taken using a digital camera. The point would then be added to the GIS as a separate layer of sample data. At the end of the shift, digital photos would be processed on the same laptop and the image cross-referenced to the sample locations on GIS. Therefore, at the end of the shift, the functional systems for the area surveyed would have been drawn, attributes recorded for each system, samples taken and locations mapped on floorplans in the GIS along with a picture of each sample location. All that remained was to await the analytical results on the samples and update the database. Color-coded thematic maps could then be generated based on any attribute field in any of the databases. These printouts would then be used to show the extent of different systems on a floor, the distribution of systems found to contain ACM, the distribution of contamination on a system, or the distribution of samples on a floor.

Benefits
The real benefit of using GIS came when it was time to assess the extent of contamination on a system. By carefully reviewing the system attributes and sample data, it was possible to pinpoint where additional sampling would provide the greatest impact on the dataset and hopefully reduce the size of the area suspected to contain ACM based on the current distribution of samples.
      In this instance, the amount of material identified in the original survey as being suspected of containing ACM was reduced by 54 percent. When compared to what it was costing the company for remediation services in a single year, the cost savings correlated to greater than $250,000 in the first year alone.
      Other benefits included the integration of a visual component to the O & M plan for the facility. Whenever maintenance or repair work is needed on an insulated system, the precise location is called up on the GIS to verify the location and condition of the line. The digital photos are reviewed in the office, reducing the need for field verifications.
      During remediation efforts, GIS was used to generate the base maps for bidding packages. After remediation efforts, the GIS is quickly updated because all the lines are in digital format. When new systems are built they are also added to the base GIS. The facility engineer has commented on how important a tool the GIS has become. He can carry a laptop with him and at any time, from any place in the facility, be able to call up mechanical floorplans of where he is and review the attributes in the database.

Conclusion
In those situations where asbestos or lead based paint have been identified at a facility, a GIS can be shown to be a very cost effective survey and management tool. The initial cost of the GIS component at this facility was recouped several times over before the project was completed by eliminating unnecessary cleanup costs.

About the Author:
Paul R. Kopsick is a senior geoscientist and GIS manager at DynCorp of Reston, Va. He may be reached at 703-519-1226 or via email at [email protected].

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