Page 8 - Tennessee 811 Magazine 2021 Issue 3

New Mapping Technology Helps Pleasant View Grow By Jason Fryer
Damage Prevention Liaison Tennessee811
Like many other towns across the state, Pleasant View, TN is experiencing significant growth. The town is located about 30 minutes outside of Nashville and has a major thoroughfare (Interstate 24) running through its front yard. Their motto is, “Away from it all. Close to everything.” That selling point has made the area desirable for natives and transplants who want to live outside the city, but close enough to visit. A population of 5,113 people was reported in the 2020 census,
an increase of more than 23% since 2010. Construction projects are at an all-time high, despite the high costs
of lumber, land, and pipe products. With the amount of excavation taking place, many utilities and professional excavators are installing new facilities in both residential and commercial areas of town.
I recently sat down with Stephen Ayres, General Manager of Pleasant View Utility District (PVUD), who confirmed that the area is booming. He said, “There are more active construction sites in our district than there have ever been.” It takes hard work and innovative thinking for a utility system to effectively keep up with this kind
of development, so I asked Stephen what steps they’ve taken to protect their existing utilities and to facilitate future expansion. Stephen told me they’ve given some serious attention
to improving their maps, which can contribute to successful locating, efficient maintenance, and planning for future construction. Like many utilities, PVUD eased into digital mapping
with static maps, a simple approach based on older paper maps, but static maps have limited capabilities when it comes to updates or editing. Stephen noted that Cathy Burke, PVUD’s GIS administrator, deserves a great deal of credit for updating the utility’s maps over the years and for the recent switch to a Geographic Information System (GIS) approach that connects many layers of data to the map.
Stephen listed a few selling points of using GIS maps. First, GIS has given PVUD a faster response time on locate requests. To give you an idea, PVUD receives around 150 tickets a week for locate requests. PVUD’s locator, Tristan Binkley, doesn’t have to come into the office to print off locate request tickets from an email anymore. He can access both their GIS maps and Tennessee 811’s mobile app on an electronic device
(an iPad, for example) to streamline locating facilities. Secondly, their GIS has become a way of capturing and retaining the knowledge of experienced workers. In the next five years, 30-40% of the workforce in the utility industry will be retiring and Stephen told me, “It is incredibly important while you have those experienced workers still there
to save the information.” Lastly, using GIS maps are a money saver. Stephen explained, “Anyone that has worked on a leak before knows you can sometimes spend as much time looking for a main as you would fixing the leak or putting in a new tap. Any water utility, no matter the size will benefit by moving their data into GIS.”
PVUD is fully committed to damage prevention to responsibly manage
the area’s growth. Their GIS mapping technology facilitates their daily work, but Stephen assured me that he and his team have not forgotten the importance of keeping a great working relationship with professional excavators and their customers to keep things moving forward in Pleasant View. He said, “Sometimes the best technology is a good operator, a probe, and a shovel to get an eye on the pipe, so you know the locate is right on.”
6 • Tennessee811 2021, Issue 3