Arlington City Employees Team Up to Develop Apps That Better Track Storm Damage, Mosquito Control Efforts
By Susan Schrock, Office of Communication
Posted on October 17, 2019, October 17, 2019

Put Technology to Work

Whether surveilling mosquito populations or storm damage to businesses and homes, City of Arlington employees are developing innovative apps designed to help workers out in the field collect and report data more quickly and efficiently.

The Office of Strategic Initiatives and the IT-GIS team recently collaborated with Planning and Development Services' Health Services and the Office of Emergency Management on two apps that allow city employees to securely input data and photos remotely using their smart phones or tablets instead of writing down the information on paper and then manually entering addresses, notes and other details at a later time.

One of the apps, the Storm Assessment Dashboard, was developed in response to an EF-1 tornado that touched down on Father’s Day this year and damaged buildings, vehicles and trees near Globe Life Park and AT&T Stadium. To speed up reporting about the hardest hit areas, a team of employees developed an app using ArcGIS Online with drop-down fields, geolocation and photo uploading capabilities so that OEM employees surveilling neighborhoods could provide a real-time view of damage to the City’s Office of Emergency Management.

Another new app now allows Health Services technicians to log information about the City’s mosquito larvicide applications directly into the City’s Data Analytics Portal using their hand-held smart tablets. This information includes the exact location where mosquito dunks were deployed in standing water and how many dunks were deployed in each location as part of Arlington’s efforts to control the mosquito population in the interest of public health. Previously, the technicians would type up and send the information about the dozens of mosquito breeding locations they had treated by email to be manually entered into a citywide database.

The cross-departmental collaboration and creation of these user-friendly apps exemplify the City of Arlington’s priority to Put Technology to Work and provide better services and experiences to all who we serve – residents, businesses, schools and visitors alike.

For more information about these projects, Arlington Open Data, or if you have any other innovative ideas to share, visit https://www.arlingtontx.gov/open_data/get_involved or email [email protected].

Storm Damage Assessment Dashboard

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