Reflections, Twenty-One Years On

Yesterday was the 21st anniversary of 9/11. I tend to let that day go by without comment. My recollections of the day itself add nothing as I was 50 miles outside of DC at the time. Even that far away, the roads were filled with panicked people and the phone networks were crashing, but I wasn’t in the city and I have nothing to add about that day.

Twenty-one years ago today, I was driving back home with my family and, as we crossed the Harry Nice Bridge from Virginia back into Maryland, it was flanked on either side by armed boats from local law enforcement and the National Guard. At that time, I was a contractor supporting an infrastructure protection program for the Department of Defense. There was no clearer illustration of the importance of what we did than those boats on that day.

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Working with HIFLD Open Data

I finally had a little time to play with some of the data available through the HIFLD Open site.  For my first pass, I decided to have a little fun by estimating how much of the United States a driver could cover in an electric vehicle while remaining in range of a charging station. For vehice ranges, I used the report ranges in this article: 10 Electric Vehicles With the Best Range in 2015.

electric_app

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HIFLD Open

Among the many things I did at the Esri Federal GIS Conference was that I attended the Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) community meeting. HIFLD is now an FGDC Subcommittee, being led my Mr. David Alexander, head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Geospatial Management Office (GMO). Now that the alphabet soup is out … Read more