Chicago Power Outage Notification and Tracking System
- Client: City of Chicago Department
of Fleet & Facility Management - Prime Consultant: Urban GIS
About this Project
The City asked Urban GIS to update and enhance the City of Chicago’s Power Outage Notification and Tracking System (PONTS) application. The improvements we made allow staff to notify management about outages in electrical service areas, or “feeders.” This version of PONTS automates many tasks, and allows in-depth reporting, visualization, and widespread access to outage information.
The enhanced PONTS application quickly and easily provides key information about outages and their effects. Management can now quickly build focused reports to share with key decision makers. This improves a process that was highly time-consuming and laborious. Management can identify the exact boundaries of those areas affected by outages, and they can identify critical facilities within those boundaries. Prior to these enhancements, City Police and Fire personnel drove the streets of affected feeders and did a visual inspection to identify critical facilities. Now, Emergency responders can view the application and go directly to those affected sites.
Urban GIS’ reporting “dashboard” allows users to generate a variety of reports based on outage status, location, political boundaries, or date. With this easy-to-use, users can turn map features on/off, add detailed aerial images, and perform queries of feeder status. Users can also download reports based on any map query. An important addition to the system is the “Critical Facilities” dataset that shows priority energy users who would be most negatively affected by an outage, such as hospitals, senior housing, and transit infrastructure.
