Innovation Description and Benefit:

This innovation began with a conversation over a struggle to find drains in downtown Kansas City during localized storm flooding. In recent years, there has been significant turnover in the positions of area engineer and in maintenance positions in Jackson County. While in the past these positions were able to rely on historical knowledge from those they worked with, this knowledge is no longer available. The need for an actual system with stored data was crucial. From conversations, we were able to begin utilizing a GPS unit to walk areas of downtown and quickly locate road grates, drop boxes and tubes. We marked these using GPS wayfinding points and saved them in the Garmin unit and then imported to Google Earth. As we are adding wayfinding points, we are also taking a photo of the area and drafting a description to import into Google Maps. All of the information can easily be exported as a .kmz file and shared to maintenance supervisors. Supervisors can then easily pull up the photo and exact location in Google Maps. This helps locate exact location of the drain that needs to be repaired, along with getting a visual of what is needed to make the repair.