Improving wildfire monitoring.

This session was originally presented at IQGeo's 2021 virtual meetup. The session is headlined by guest speaker Matt Brown, Manager of Records and Information Management at North River Midstream. In this short video, Matt shares how IQGeo products, tools, and features are used at North River Midstream and the value it brings to his business. Matt Brown, Hi everybody. As Andy mentioned, I'm Matthew Brown. So I'm the Manager of Applications, Records and Information Management here at North River Midstream. I've been in the IT industry for about 20 years with a background in application development and software architecture. And for the past roughly two and a half years, three years, I've been the IT application owner of our GIS application here at North River. Matt Brown, Hi everybody. And during this past year, we've had the opportunity to work with IQGeo in terms of bringing some of our legacy GIS systems to the web, to mobile, and I'm looking forward to giving you an overview of our journey to date. Okay. So just a little bit about North River Midstream. So we are Canadian gas gathering and processing business here in Elvira. Here in Alberta and British Columbia, which is in Western Canada for the international folks. We actively operate 13 natural gas processing facilities and the associated gathering infrastructure that goes with it. And some of these assets have been operating for up to 60 years under previous owners, such as West Coast, Duke Energy, Spectra, and most recently Enbridge. And just in terms of our scale, in terms of our market, we manage approximately 20% of the natural gas that flows through British Columbia on any particular day. Matt Brown, Just to sort of level set in terms of how our assets are dispersed in the region. The green lines on this map represent our gathering pipelines. The blue dots represent our facilities. And basically, we use these pipelines to pull in natural gas from producers to our facilities for processing, or to move our process product onto transportation pipelines for delivery to markets in the US and Canada. Matt Brown, Just to say, a quick overview of how we do IT here at NRM. So as I mentioned, we acquired these assets from Enbridge back 2018, 2019. We did get the physical field infrastructure from Enbridge, but we didn't get any corporate IT infrastructure. So it sort of gave us a unique position to sort of start off in the cloud. So we're cloud first, we have no on premise servers for our corporate network. We focus on consumer off the shelf products wherever possible. We focus on leveraging our scalable platforms such as SAP, service now open text and Office 365. We definitely look for a configuration over customization, with an aim to empower users with the technology they require to do their jobs efficiently. And so this cloud first strategy, and just as an aside, really did enable us to transition quite seamlessly to working from home during the pandemic. So we didn't have to scramble to get users VPN laptops or anything like that. So definitely benefit a lot from that infrastructure. Matt Brown, So moving on to sort of how this gets us into IQ geo. So we inherited a legacy small world GIS system from the predecessor companies. Matt Brown, The systems had continual attention and investment for the past 24 years. So it hasn't been left out in the cold. You know, we've been very fortunate to have members of the original team still working on the product with us today. Matt Brown, And the system itself really does encompass a broad range of modules and functional. It really is a really full featured system. But it is an expert based system and our occasional users can struggle and realistically, it has much more functionality than the average end user would require. Matt Brown, So there's just a quick overview of our quote unquote legacy system. Again, it's very robust and comprehensive and service very well. And there's really sort of nine modules that we're starting from. So one of our primary modules is our integrity module, which has our corrosion manager and inline inspections. The damage prevention module, one item I'll call it here really is our one call ticketing. So we pull in all of our one call tickets, Matt Brown, take us from BC and Alberta into the system. For those of you maybe not familiar with the term one call, that's really the call before you dig number here in Western Canada. Matt Brown, We also have a full emergency response module in our current system, we have land rights management and stakeholder engagement, which really covers off really a fully featured land system again in the system. We also manage our communications and our environmental components in here. And we do our asset as bill. Matt Brown, So definitely very full featured. And we also have a really full and proper query and reporting module as well. Matt Brown, So as that previous slide shows, we have a lot of great information that could assist the users here at NRM. And we really sort of wanted to focus on exposing that high value information to a broader range of users, rather than having it trapped within a with an expert based system. Matt Brown, So we really wanted to look at ways that we could enable web and mobile options for users, fresh, easy, intuitive interface. And I think it's important out here really with going into IQ geo really not trying to duplicate our small world styles and functionality, we really want to leverage that modern interface. And the system really should stand on its own. Matt Brown, So where are we with IQ geo so we started our pilot approximately 12 months ago, and we chose applications that would really provide immediate value to us and demonstrate some of the capabilities that we saw in the IQ geo platform that really really did find intriguing. Matt Brown, We're currently on IQ geo 6.1 and we have four applications deployed and production, I'm going to give you an overview of two here in a moment. Matt Brown, So the first one is our wildfire monitoring application. So it was built really to provide monitoring and learning for assets during this past 2021 wildfire season here in Canada. Matt Brown, In terms of data sources, we pull a lot of our small world information, our GS centerline, our facility data, and we also leveraged IQ geo's ability to pull in real time web services from the BC and Alberta wildfire services. Matt Brown, And that gave us our locations, danger ratings, evacuation orders, road closures, etc. Matt Brown, It was important to us that it be easy to use and distribute across the organization. And again, we really wanted as much as possible to focus on the data. Matt Brown, We really wanted as much as possible to focus on configuration and not customization. Matt Brown, Note here, we were, when we look back at it, we were able to actually build this application very quickly. So, Matt Brown, Obviously, as a first application, we had some time that for startup to install and configure in the environment, build up familiarize ourselves with the tool and features. Matt Brown, But when we go back and we talk to our developer and sort of go through how much time it actually took to actually build the wirefire application. Matt Brown, We figure it was about one week, which I think to me, that's a really good example of the time to time to impact concept that was mentioned during the keynote a few days ago. Matt Brown, And another really important feature to us really was the enablement of keyword searches. So you can see here the keyword within. So it's really important for us to understand which fires were within three kilometers of an asset within three and 10 or really outside 10 kilometers, which really within our organization was considered a safe distance. Matt Brown, So here we have a closer look from a screenshot. This is taken from a few days ago. Unfortunately, our wildfire season is coming to a close. Matt Brown, So the number of dots on the application itself has reduced significantly. Matt Brown, If I take a screenshot of this back in July, the Western Canada, especially BC was really just nothing but a few days ago. Matt Brown, The red dot here represents a fire that's currently active and it's within three kilometers of an asset. This outline here actually highlights the total area that this fire has burned since ignition. Matt Brown, The blue line is actually one of our pipelines. Matt Brown, And over here we can see some of our communication towers and on the left side, some information about the fire. Matt Brown, So the date when it was loaded. So obviously this was a screenshot from a few days ago, but we actually are loading this wildfire service data hourly. So it's pretty close to real time for us. Matt Brown, The status of the fire. Matt Brown, The current. Matt Brown, The cause out down here as well. Some predefined queries. So at risk pipeline. So if I had to click at risk pipelines, that would bring me into a preset query to sort of show us our risk assets, which in this case is the helmet 16 inch pipeline, which is this pipeline here. Matt Brown, Which we're looking at now. Matt Brown, We're also in the spirit of getting information out there, we're leveraging FME to send a report to our operations leadership every morning and really leveraging that same information that we've got in IQ geo. Matt Brown, And just putting it in a spreadsheet format as well for consumption. We want to do more of these reports next year. We like to include embed images from the maps right in the email. Matt Brown, But for our first year for our pilot, this is really as far as we got in terms of those types of communication. Matt Brown, And so this next slide, I think this is going to show this to you as we sort of wrap up the wildfire monitoring portion really sort of shows the importance to us and the companies in Western Canada for wildfire monitoring. Matt Brown, So as of October 16th and BC and Alberta combined there were 2909 fires, which burned about 921,000 hectares. Matt Brown, And the vast majority of these fires were in British Columbia, but we did have some fires in Alberta as well. Matt Brown, So sort of moving on wildfire monitoring was our first and we got our feet wet there, but we really didn't really stop there. Matt Brown, So I do want to sort of talk to you a little bit about our emergency awareness application and how we're using that and how we see this actually continuing to add more value for us as we progress with our time with IQ geo. Matt Brown, So NRM were required by our regulators to monitor and to correspond with our parties that have structures within prescribed distances of our pipeline. Matt Brown, So we're using the pipeline and that's calculated based on the pressure of the pipeline, the contents of the pipeline. Matt Brown, There's a lot of a lot of factors that go into there, but we're obviously we're required to monitor and ensure that we are providing any timely updates to people in the area if necessary. Matt Brown, And this emergency awareness data really is currently maintained in our small world GIS database. Matt Brown, And we thought that this would be a really illogical next step for us to be able to expose some of this area, some of this data through IQ geo and then sort of get it. Matt Brown, More readily available in the hands of more of our North River personnel. Matt Brown, Obviously, we have people that are using this data today in small world as well, but we wanted to make it a bit more user friendly and and have the high value data shared out and much more readily available to those end users. Matt Brown, So just a slight throw here on the technical piece. Matt Brown, So we are nightly synchronizing to IQ geo from our small world data using the IQ geo ETL. Matt Brown, We were really pleased with the change detection system that we're able to leverage and pull that data into IQ geo. Matt Brown, We found it very, very helpful and very, very good today. Matt Brown, And in terms of our emergency awareness application, we really wanted to make sure we could allow that easy and intuitive access to information regarding residents. Matt Brown, Have they been consulted? Have they not been consulted? Matt Brown, Is there any critical information that in an emergency, we would want somebody to know as soon as possible? Matt Brown, And because this, you know, these can be dynamic situations. Matt Brown, We also want to really provide that opportunity for keyword searching. Matt Brown, So can you kind of search on a surface development? Can I search on a land owners name? Matt Brown, You know, all those things are possible within our system. Matt Brown, So this is another IQ geo screenshot, but really what we want to show you here is terms of our emergency awareness application that we currently have deployed. Matt Brown, We can see a map of all the structures in a particular area. Matt Brown, If we select a structure, it's going to provide a lot of important information about that structure. Matt Brown, Obviously, a lot of personal information. Matt Brown, So we blanked out a lot here, but things like here, poor cell service and service in area, text are more dependable. Matt Brown, So that's that's something that, you know, perhaps could be very valuable to someone in the event of emergency if we're trying to contact a landowner. Matt Brown, And I should point out here too, that obviously the application security in this area is much tighter than than with our wildfire application. Matt Brown, So sort of ongoing development with our emergency response emergency awareness application really is, again, sort of making more information available. Matt Brown, So we have deployed the ability to pull up all the contact information for a particular area. Matt Brown, So I can draw a polygon over a particular area. Matt Brown, Perhaps that's the emergency planning zone or the emergency response zone that we need to react in. Matt Brown, And that will immediately bring us up a list of all of the properties in that zone, as well as the primary phone numbers where they sit. Matt Brown, And obviously, in emergency, having that information at the tip of your fingertips is extremely critical. Matt Brown, Going forward, we also would like to leverage the IQ. Matt Brown, The IQ. Go platform and some other cloud services to really sort of go a step further on this and introduce automatic dialing. Matt Brown, There are some strong services out there and we have done that in some proofs of concept. Matt Brown, So that's probably where we see things going next in this area. Matt Brown, And not surprisingly, with emergency awareness and the distribution of our assets, the ability within IQ. Go to have this information on a phone is really provide some real value to us. Matt Brown, And just over here on the right here, you actually can see that within the platform itself, I can take a surface development. Matt Brown, And if I'm in the field and I need to go to make contact with the landowner for whatever reason, I actually can choose the driving instructions and get driving directions from where I currently am on my phone to that particular area. Matt Brown, So in remote areas, this is extremely valuable to us. Matt Brown, So in summary, you know, we're currently using IQ. Go to supplement small world. Matt Brown, We're not trying to duplicate small world. Matt Brown, And we wanted to create a fresh, easy and intuitive interface where we could query and view that data. Matt Brown, We do want to get beyond just read only data. Matt Brown, So we want to move specific objects out of small world and into the post GIS database as the record of truth. Matt Brown, And with those records of truth also make available available the ability to update that data within IQ. Go and maintain it within IQ. Go. Matt Brown, So that's that's the direction where we see ourselves going. Matt Brown, And with that, that concludes my presentation. I will turn it back over to the moderator.