started um if I know how to work this maybe okay so for those who don’t know

science for Georgia was founded in 2018 it came out of the March for Science and

so it was really built to create a Grassroots network of science friendly people who believe in science and

technology and what we’re all about is creating change in Georgia through science um I think many of you know

living in Atlanta you know science is very important and needs to be advocated

for across the state so we have a three-prong Mission the first part of that is to improve communication among

scientists and the public so part of that is to help train scientists on how to engage with the public so we have the

scom academy is a great training ground for students postdocs and we’re going to begin offering you know a professional

development version as well where we help scientists understand how to communicate their research to the public

and then the second part is to increase public engagement with science so through events like this Georgia science

Junction we also have climate survival training where we give you really Hands-On um experience on how to be

ready for the new world as it as it emerges and then we also have the

catalyzer network that helps advocate for change as well and jazz hands so just all kinds of events to help

increase public engagement with science and these are some pictures of those events so you can see manuals very

popular um and then these are some of our science comedy jazz hands

performances and so as I mentioned we’re expanding into professional development work shops so this is kind of taking

that scom Academy training and a little bit of that jazz hands comedy training

and taking it to professional development workshops so if you have a business work in a business and you’re looking for um things to take to your

employees please talk to us about signing up for humor

me and then the last part of science for Georgia’s mission is to advocate for the responsible use of Science in public

policy so we’re at the legislative session every year in January talking to

lawmakers helping explain the science behind some of the bills and really being a resource to people who may not

be experts in you know everything because it’s a big state and there’s a lot of really diverse

bills and then this is one of our Flagship events the environmental justice and climate protection

conference so this year it was in Savannah it usually takes place over the summer and we’re trying to work our way

around the state so next year we’ll be in valdasta so if you want to take a little field trip you can head down to

valasa next June with us and this is just some background on

um science for Georgia but I also wanted to give a bit of background on the speakers

and our talk that you’re going to hear so obviously this manuals is a great establishment for hosting us so please

be sure to tip your servers and there’s a bunch of ways to get involved so

you can head to our website which has inter intermittent functionality as you may have encountered today but generally

is a good resource for how to get involved with us so as I mentioned science for Georgia

public engagement with science is a key pillar of our mission but it’s not just about what the scientists find most interesting it’s about identifying

public concerns and providing scientific information and resources to educate and Empower communities so that’s what what

we’re about today so I think we can all agree that water is definitely a concern

um like many of you I’m a resident of the city of Atlanta and I had a lot of questions when the water mains broke

last month and I was very lucky to have Chris and Maya as friends to ask some of

these questions during the time so I thought more of you might be interested in this um so I’m excited today to

introduce our speakers Maya Goldman and Chris Rice who will be presenting um their talk entitled navigating the flow

visualizing how water is managed and so Maya works with the Metropolitan North Georgia water

planning district and Chris is an account manager at ezri and they have a lot of insights on this topic and I’ll

let them further introduce themselves and share their passion thank [Applause]

you how’s everybody doing oh good this works everybody doing well

beautiful am I on yeah okay cool um hey everybody so I think we can just dive

right into it but I guess before that thank you Patrick for inviting us and Oli for uh introducing us uh and getting

getting this chance to like work together and learn what each other does and Get Hype so that we can hype you

guys up about geology GIS and water so um I think that’s what we’re going to

talk about so without further Ado um I think we did really good introductions

but I guess just for more background so why you should trust me about water stuff I’ve worked for over seven years

as a consultant engineer in variety of different water projects from Dam inspections to uh wastewater treatment

plant design and construction um so any like General Knowledge Questions on water

infrastructure uh hopefully I can answer those questions um but before that we’ll

kind of give you some background on where your water comes from and how it’s treated in

general awesome thanks Maya thank you Al for the introduction uh thank you to

Manuel’s Tavern for hosting us uh I’ve been here many times never in this uh in

this context so it’s really great to be here uh be sure to tip uh Mia your server she’s been doing an awesome job

uh it seems like she’s the only one servicing this whole room so yeah definitely take care of her and uh

yes let’s hear it yeah so um all right so about me uh

so I work for a company called ezri I like to say we’re the biggest company nobody’s ever heard of you’ve almost

certainly interacted with our software in some way shape or form uh but we’re

the largest mapping company in the world um so while my title’s account manager

I’m really not sales really what I do is I work with uh really the major uh

municipalities in the Atlanta area city of Atlanta the airport uh all the big counties and I helped them maximize

their use of GIS so um I’m certainly not a water expert I’m a GIS expert but

that’s why I’m I’m so glad to have Maya here uh who um I’ve already learned so much from just you know by going through

this process with her so uh I’m certain that you will too so Maya yeah and I’m a super big GIS nerd as well even though I

don’t know how it works like Chris does so this will be fun um so like I said I’ll start with

just water in Georgia and Metro Atlanta so we kind of start off at the with the same ideas and why it’s important whoop

sorry and I’ll talk a little bit about how that water is managed I’ll send it over to Chris to explain what GIS is and

what you can do with it and hopefully by the end we’ve excited you guys enough that you want to learn more so we’ll

leave you with what you can do next so starting with water in Georgia and Metro Atlanta since y’all are a

science room uh obviously I’ll start with that and geology and geography

determine a lot about your local water system system I’m sure a lot of you know some of this already but I wanted to

start with some diagrams here um first of all the red stars city of Atlanta

that’s where we are now and we’re in the What’s called the pedmont region which means we have this really thick

underlying layer of clay if you’ve been in science class and played with the red clay that’s the pedmont red clay that

we’re talking about and also tons of rock really thick layer of rock if you

know you saw a lot of movies filmed in rock quaries a lot of granite is from

here so that means we don’t really have the same groundwater resource access that the southern coast uh coastal

plains do what does that mean for us well it means that 99% of the water we

use here in the Metro Atlanta region is surface water and what is that surface

water mainly where we are Lake laner and the chattah huchi river so I know you

all are probably used to seeing the water cycle um but just to kind of drive

home the point of why surface water is important and why we need to rely on it

um the surface water in the river and the lake come from rain water

exclusively so the rain comes down it hits these high points in the mountains

um and goes from small tributaries in cre Creeks collects and ends at a at a

larger body of water Downstream this is what we call Watershed so this Watershed

the land that the water hits and flows through that’s where our water comes from that’s how it ends up in the

chattah huchi that’s how it ends up in all of our local creeks and

lakes so this black outline you see here is generally the Metropolitan North

Georgia water Planning District that’s kind of what I’m going to speak as the Metro Atlanta region just for today um

and as you can see it’s at the top of the river so obviously as you go down

there’s an to the bottom of the river there’s more water in it right so you might be thinking why is Atlanta at the

top of the river where there’s less water well I think a lot of you know the answer to that and that is the railroads

so why does connecting this all back to water right Atlanta was located here for

the railroads for transportation we are not the kind of um you know hub for

navigation and ports and beautiful rolling ocean uh that a lot of big

metropolitan areas are known for uh in fact the city of Atlanta or the

metropolitan Atlanta area is the largest metropolitan region with that relies on

the smallest amount of smallest body of water so that’s why we in Atlanta are

special in the city of Georgia one of many reasons but so if you’ve lived in this

area long enough you’ve probably experienced this scarcity of resources there’s there’s been a lot of

droughts we’ve talked about the lake levels being low you’ve probably been told not to water your lawn um so that’s

what happens when we don’t have enough water right if we don’t have enough rain but we also have the issue of too much

water and in fact this month we’ve had a moderate version of both so just this

July we’ve had both moderate drought and flooding um so in Georgia we’ve got this

special geology geography the science of where we are is thought you like love it no that

was very good the science of where we are results in all of these water challenges that we experience

dayto day um

and uh so how is all of this water managed the the the scarcity of

resources and the quantity of water as well as the quantity of quality uh is

managed by water Professionals in a number of ways um and it’s really important since we’re at the top of let

me go back one more point where at the top of not just the chattah huchi but

all of the major rivers in the state of Georgia which means if we don’t manage our Water Wisely and sustainably not

only will the metropolitan Atlanta region be without but so will the the rest of the state so how do we manage

these resources not only for ourselves but all of our Downstream Neighbors in the rest of the state of

Georgia so water professionals talk about water in three main buckets so I’m

kind of going to introduce those now first of all is drinking water and

drinking water comes from streams and rivers it gets treated in drinking water treatment plants and then comes out of

our taps or out of the Taps here in Manual’s Tavern uh so hopefully your

Libations are part of that system um the wastewater treatment plants pull W that

water from from toilets from drains those also um go through a wastewater

treatment facility before being released into the environment and storm water storm water is a little special we don’t

usually have a centralized treatment system so the rain that falls on our impervious surfaces on our streets and

sidewalks um gets conveyed maybe through a ditch maybe through some other means

like a pipe and it ends up in our streams directly no other treatment so the qu

quality of our water is determined by how we treat our land if you leave some

dog poop on the sidewalk that’s going to end up in our streams if you leave trash same thing so the quality of our storm

water is based on how we treat the land and the quantity is based on the decisions we make around managing these

uh storms so I want to start with an example that a lot of you are probably familiar with um one that you might have

driven past or biked past on your way here and that is uh historic Fourth Ward

Park this is a great public amenity a great Park I enjoy going there on runs

and when I’m at Pawn City Market but it’s also a storm Water Management

Facility so this is an area where there’s a lot of impervious surface

there’s a lot of development that’s happened since the sewer system was built what that means is as we’re

getting bigger and bigger storms because of climate change we’re also getting more and more storm water runoff yes

because of bit bigger storms and more rain but also because that rain doesn’t

have anywhere to go it runs off of all of this development that we’ve created and either goes into our sewer systems

or it stays on the street and floods all right so city of Atlanta had this problem there was floods they didn’t

they didn’t want this to happen anymore right and they also wanted to continue development so in order to do this they

could have dug up the pipes and built bigger ones they could have done parallel storm water pipes and they

could have just put a really big concrete tank underground and that would hold the water but instead they had this

really great creative solution where they had this par they created this park amenity they d a creek that was buried

much like a lot of our creeks in the city of Atlanta they’ve been bued buried under our streets and our buildings and

this was a chance to bring nature back to people allow for wildlife to have

habitat and have this beautiful public benefit uh in the center of the

city maybe not the center of the city but you know what I mean so this is a great uh system and I

want to show you how this works from a storm water management

perspective this is a picture oh how does the okay yeah this picture on the

left is after a 4 in rainfall within 24 hours that’s a lot of water so as you

can see the water levels all the way up past all the sidewalks that people typically walk on and the really cool

thing about this Pond is that all of the plants the handrails the concrete everything that was uh in this park is

designed to be submerged for a long period of time and the great thing about

collecting the storm water is it’s twofold it’s both a quantity and a quantity management system quantity wise

it holds this water here as opposed to on the streets and places that we don’t want it to be uh and releases it slowly

into the sewers so that we don’t overwhelm these pipes that just aren’t uh able to deal with it and it also

allows for all of the soils and bacteria that have been swept along in the storm

water system to settle out and actually be treated by these plants um and settle

to the bottom of the lake before they’re returned into our environment um and I’m just curious uh

has anybody here been to this park before and did you know that it was it served like a practical purpose as well

I know this is a you know pretty smart group so a lot of you may have done that research ahead of time but I know when I

first read about this I was pretty Blown Away by that and it really changed how I saw many other Parks I mean this isn’t

unique to Atlanta you go to other cities they’ll have similar storm water parks like this in fact we have uh what’s the

one on the west side in Vine City yeah uh Rodney cook Park basically does the same thing that’s over in Vine City yeah

it’s really cool yeah so that’s that’s uh the first

example I guess of how we manage storm water um but this happens at all scales

so the state of Georgia has a model of all the surface water in the entire

State uh and how some users upstair upstream and downstream um affect each

other there’s Regional planning which is what I do for work where jurisdictions

and basically neighbors talk about their water management systems and how they interact with each other um there’s

county level treatment facilities like this engineered Wetland which not only treats your water uh to a better quality

before being released but it also creates a beautiful Wetland and habitat uh for wildlife and I’ve been there it’s

beautiful I don’t know if any of you make your way out there or not but you should check it out this is uh in

Clayton County uh it’s called a huey constructed Wetland um and then even at your house

you have storm water management if you have a sistern or rain barrel that you collect water from your rooftop to water

your your garden that’s a pretty common uh storm water management system at the

individual scale so I think I’ve talked enough about water so before I hand it off to Chris

I’ll just kind of finish with the treatment of waste water drinking water

and storm water at all of these different scales has an immense mindboggling amount of infrastructure

attached to it from the pipes and the manholes and the drains that you walk past to the pumps and all the mechanical

equipment and chemicals that are dosed at the plants there’s just an insane amount of acid sets that uh you need to

know where they are we need to know how to maintain them and so that’s where

Chris comes in and the gis systems uh are some of the most common and useful

tools we have for understanding all of these really complex systems in a way

that we can make the best decisions we can again not for just us but all of the folks Downstream of

us awesome so does anybody here has anyone here ever heard of GIS like even

heard of it okay that’s actually not bad uh does anybody actually know what it is

past okay sweet that’s that’s uh I think that was maybe a tenth of the room and that’s actually better than most rooms

I’m in talking about GIS so um GIS stands for geographic information

systems sometimes you’ll see geographic information science it’s essentially the same thing uh but essentially a GIS G

geographic information system is information system so an information system is um a spreadsheet um a database

like really any set of components for managing information that’s an information system the G geography

that’s the the science of wear that’s where the spatial component comes in and

even though if you haven’t even though you may not have heard of GIS literally you’ll see as I go through

this presentation you use it every day whether you think you do or not um like I said I work with every single uh major

city and and county in the Atlanta metro area and something like I believe 90

close to 90% of municipalities use GIS technology in some way and that other

10% are like you know cities of 10 people that you know the county does it

for them so um so I wanted to actually I did this right before everybody showed

up um this was just kind of fun spur of the moment so actually walked around with my phone and uh collected uh and

created a 3D model of the room that we’re in with lar and you know RGB

cameras just your regular camera that you have on your phone let’s see if I can ruin the whole presentation by going

to an outside link and we’ll see if this works uh

yeah well it’s showing for me uh I don’t want to over complicate it I can show anybody who’s interested

afterward um but looks really cool yeah so essentially um you collect the lar is

collecting like the depth information and that uh the information that our human eyes can’t see and cameras can’t

see and allowing you to create those 3D representations and that’s really a bread and butter of GIS is initially

collecting that data so um yeah if you’re interested I can show you that on my phone or on the laptop

afterward um but to start start off I just wanted to show you some like really big picture ideas of what you can do

with GIS and then we’ll we’ll kind of narrow down into how it affects Water Systems how it’s practically used by you

know engineers and people out in the field uh but to start now um you know

climate change is a huge problem obviously um and GIS is critical in understanding how

our environment has changed and projecting out um how it will continue to change based off various criteria if

we continue to pollute the planet at the rates that we are um it’s going to be

very bad for us as I think we all know uh but we also have I like this example right here just because it’s local but

this is the Tall Timbers research station in Albany Georgia and it tracks uh smoke from wildfires and um we don’t

have a ton of wildfires here but you know you can do the same thing with GIS up in you know Pacific Northwest uh

California you know those areas um some more examples here so natural resource

mapping obviously that connects to what we do water basin management um that’s

uh Stream flow modeling so navigating the flow modeling the flow of rivers uh

really just helps you understand the world in a digital sense and then make informed decisions that’s really what

GIS is all about uh Urban and Regional planning um Urban Design that uh Magna

Utah example is really cool um uh basically I’m sure we’ve all been in a

situation where your neighbor they want to build like a giant high-rise in your neighborhood of course everybody freaks out and um this helps um you know

project the impact of those developments on traffic on you know demographics of

the neighborhood um how it may affect job growth all these sorts of things is are things that you can do with GIS um

and last thing I wanted to touch on the indoor GIS because I took that uh you know created that 3D model in here is

that you can manage your your indoor Assets in addition to I think a lot of times when people do know what GIS is

and think of maps they often think of maps of of the world around us of outdoor Maps uh but you can also map

indoors um uh cool example here I love all the campus planning and management because you know University campuses

especially major universities they’re all they’re basically cities of their own and they need to uh do a lot of the

similar things that um real cities do to to manage their

growth so I’m not gonna try to well I’ll try to play it I’m a risk taker let’s

see if it works uh so so yeah my I think it it’s the bar is moving oh here we go

Maya can talk about this a little bit this was yeah sure Maya’s Muse I mean I I just love this visualization because

it’s a website that any of you can go to right now and it’s created by with USGS data and and what I did was I just

zoomed into Manual’s Tavern clicked it and it shows you where that raindrop

that falls on the rooftop of Manuel’s Tavern or on the street outside would end up if it you know kept going so just

a visualization of from Manual’s Tavern to the Gulf of Mexico um I just think

it’s cool you’re right it is very cool uh yeah yeah I’m a big fan of that

that’s really cool and it’s a great visualization for people who maybe understand the concept of okay water

that H like I use here could end up Downstream but this really drives home

like how many folks it impacts on its way down to to the ocean totally

totally um and this is um a flood simulation so

this is using ezri software essentially what you can do is um this is again like

taking data using it to make informed decisions so that you can be proactive and how you’re managing your community

so uh this is a flood simulation based off you know certain variables how much

rainfall you have uh one would have data on the elevation you know hillshade

Contours and you can essentially run a simulation of hey what if we get the

four inches of rain you know in a day which is a a lot uh you know what would

that look like how would that impact our roads how would that impact our you know our water systems um so so now we’re

kind of kind of starting to approach more like okay so what does this mean for

water um and one last example because that when I said earlier that whether

you know it or not you’ve probably used GIS if you’ve ever used Google Maps that’s GIS so um this is literally just

from from my Google Maps login just pulled up manuals Tavern and I just want to break down everything that’s

happening here I think a lot of people take it for granted uh but all of this data came from somewhere

to uh the street Network to um this is a a satellite based map so uh a satellite

captured this image at a certain resolution uh you can also you’ll see for um higher resolution imagery uh

people will fly uh fixed Wing drones those are like the big ones not like a DJI drone you would fly yourself but

even uh if you’re you know let’s say like old forthward park um that’s one that you would you know fly like a DJI

like a personal use drone uh and you can use those to capture that high resolution imagery and then also if you

have lar sensors or other sensors um that can capture you know for instance

like uh the uh infrared band you can learn a lot about you know vegetation health and everything from that infrared

band of course we can’t see that with our eyes but uh with these um with these

cameras we can do that but uh so that’s where the um the satellite came from we

have all this information on manuals Tavern that is essentially crowdsourced through the reviews Google has AI tools

that will will scrape through this information and then uh build these uh

like profiles of the businesses here and even down to so I live in reynoldstown which is like here if we’re following

this map um how does Google know how to route me from here to there

how does it know if we can see with our eyes like and we we have our um real

life experience of oh yes this is a four-lane road there’s typically not much traffic you know I can route myself

but how does the computer know it’s because of GIS either real-time traffic data that it crowdsources from uh folks’

uh devices or data that they’ve um again like created with AI tools or uh it used

to be just people digitizing this data based off um based off these satellite images they would literally draw over

the road and look with their eyes and see and essentially enter into a little Excel spreadsheet attached to that

geographic feature like this is a four-lane road the speed limit’s 45 um you know there’s a left turn lane

here here are stop signs and uh the routing tools use all that information combined to tell you based off your mode

of travel because there’s walking driving cycling uh Transit it uses all

that information to then tell you the best most efficient route to take and again that’s all

GIS so this I have to give Maya some credit

for this one uh because this was she had this one slide and then I decided to make like 10 slides about it um so thank

you um but those of you who have you know ever taken a geography course Public Health course um or definitely

GIS course uh you you’ve almost definitely heard this story of Jon Snow

and um the London colera outbreak of 1854 so it’s really like I don’t know

it’s certainly not the earliest application of GIS but it’s it’s certainly the most famous the most

high-profile so essentially what um what Jon Snow found was

um oh here’s the original map the this is a more modern map of it but um we

have the original map here so uh let me go back one what’s the best one to talk

about this I’m gonna go here um so essentially what Jon Snow found is that

um there were a number of water pumps in London and you know it’s not like it is

now where every home has it you know several sinks and you can get water from your bathroom or your kitchen or your

refrigerator you know you had to go to a central water pump to get that water so

uh what Jon Snow eventually found was that the vast majority of deaths that were

occurring in that Calera outbreak were centered around um is a servicing that

the result of neighborhood deaths by pump so we can you know using GIS tools

say tell me how many of those deaths occurred in each of those neighborhoods and then associate that with the pump

that we created those walk sheds with in that neighborhood and now we have by pump how many deaths we would associate

with each individual pump and let’s just do something a little fun with it um I wouldn’t say this is the

best way to visualize this but it’s another way to visualize it um what we

did here is we took each pump and then extruded that point based off the number

of deaths to create kind of a 3d effect there so it’s just really another way to

visualize it we can again it tells the same story uh but I think it’s

incredibly important that people think about why they’re doing things um and

that’s a very broad statement but not everybody does that they just kind of do stuff but um but it’s really important

as map makers as data scientists that we think about why we’re doing what we’re doing because whether it’s on purpose or

inadvertently it’s incredibly easy to lie with maps um there’s there’s a very

famous book I forgot the author somehow but it’s called how to lie with Statistics uh there’s another book book

that’s kind of parodying that or at least parodying the title called how to lie with maps and maps are really just a

visual statistic a map is a bar chart it’s just like more complicated it’s a

visual representation of data um but yeah so let’s um you know we were

in the 1850s talking about chera and if you’re interested to learn like actually

why uh that pump had issues I would just look it up your myself people are eating

I don’t want to talk about it but it was really gross I looked it up earlier uh a friend of mine asked me like hey so what

was actually the like we know it’s that pump and something’s wrong but what exactly was wrong I looked it up and I was it’s yeah it’s pretty gross um all

right but let’s bring GIS more into the Modern Age so uh and and let’s get back

to uh you know modern Water Systems so here um this is a map of all the sewage

pipes in Hong Kong symbolized by the Upstream invert level which Maya can you

explain what that is I know you can do it better than I can yes um so the invert elevation is the invert is

basically just the bottom of the pipe so invert elevation is important to us because it basically says the depth of

the pipe and like we were talking about with natural systems where the water rain hits a high point and then goes

down to a low Point um with pipes you also want gravity to do most of the work

so you need to know those depths and elevations of the pipes one so that you’re allowing gravity to do the work

for you and two so that your toilets work so if you don’t want the invert of

the pipe to be higher than the toilets because then what happens the water doesn’t go down um and actually when I

was visiting Seattle for the first time uh I learned that they had to raise the entire city up a level so that their B

basement was now their first floor and their first floor was their second floor because toilets were invented and guess

what the pipes were too high so yeah pipe inverts are the the the elevation

of the pipes and with this map the color is basically showing the change in

elevation so just like with those natural pump natural uh streams it’s going from high with the darker colors

and low with the lighter colors but I I don’t know about you my head like two is

is really hard to visualize for me into the real world yeah so uh yeah so most

Maps we probably all interact with our 2D um and this is a symbology

representation of 3D here I think we can all sort of see the the darker colors represent a higher elevation because you

want the water to flow down the lighter colors are you know we’re we’re getting closer to the harbor um those are are

less intense uh uh invert levels there uh but let’s look at this a different way this is the same exact map

essentially but it’s in 3D and now it’s like completely obvious of course you

know high elevation to low um that’s that same data that same downstreet Downstream invert level uh just

overlayed over um 3D and there’s uh one other thing I

wanted to look at in Hong Kong before we bring it back to the United States um is

these are the exact same colors it’s the exact same data but we’re now showing something else we’re showing the width

of the pipes so you know pipes sewage or water pipes are very similar to like a

street Network in fact they often follow Street networks uh but you can see here

you have your like your big pipes your arterial pipes there’s a lot flowing through there and then as you get to

people’s uh residences they’re much much smaller and much uh smaller width we’re going from

517 millimeters or more here to 51 uh so we’re talk yeah much you know

those are really for residences um and do do you want to talk about sink holes

here or do you want to talk about sink holes later yes um well what I want to talk about for the environmentalists and

tree lovers in the room is that uh a lot of times we’ll talk about pipe systems like trees so the trunk is the bigger

wider lines so the darker lines there and then the branches are the smaller

pipes that go into people’s houses so I always like to throw that out there as some fun n nomenclature um but then what Chris was

talking about and kind of connecting all of our infrastructure together is um you know these sewer systems are super

complex they’re all over the place and uh you know yeah you have the the invert

elevations you have the widths a lot of these databases also have the material

of the pipe and the age of the pipe absolutely um so that’s information one

could use say if you have some very old pipes and they burst and nobody had water for a few days theoretically uh

that’s information you could use to be proactive in repairing those pipes yeah again this is all

theoretical and of course yeah when the pipe goes then soda the street and uh

all the other surrounding infrastructure and 11 Street Pub is still not open because it flooded it’s

terrible okay all right so um what can you actually do

with this what do you know professionals uh like Maya and others like what do

they actually do with GIS um you can track outages uh some of y’all when that

incident did occur in Atlanta you know whatever a month ago uh you may have seen several days later than it should

have been delivered uh some information on like uh outage boundaries and you

could put in your address and it would would tell you yes there’s an outage here um that’s kind of an example of that uh field data collection we have to

get all this information somehow uh often that involves uh some professional

professional going out into the field uh often using uh you know a smart device you know phone tablet and then just kind

of manually entering that data uh but then you also have a real-time data feeds so um sensors you know water depth

sensors uh other iot sensors that can um without anybody having to physically go

out into the field they can tell you based off you know a number of criteria hey there’s probably been a break in

this pipe or there’s some sort of issue so we’ll we’ll get into that and and Maya you know again I’m not an engineer

um I prepare these Solutions and and work with Engineers but Maya can um that’s why I’m so glad we’re we’re both

here is she can give you more of that like real world U you know experience um

so yeah like I said report inves uh leaks and then a big thing especially

with like a critical piece of infrastructure like water is communicating um with the citizens um so

just have an example of this here uh this is actually city of Atlanta’s watershed management um outage map um I

just want people to know this exists um I don’t know who all lives in city of Atlanta but I I don’t think they do the

best job of of communicating this um I think they’re doing more than even

people think they do they just don’t always do the the best job of communicating that so um if you’re not

in city of Atlanta you know just look up you know service interruptions map or or

public alerts or something like that for your community I would I’m very confident they would have something

similar um but here you can put in your address and it will tell you based off this data that was developed using GIS

yes you’re in a boyal water advisory no you are not uh it’ll give you points on like where the

actual breaks are um and oh one other thing this isn’t really GIS but um again

since we are experiencing you know when you experience these emergency events especially as we get close to the World

Cup there’s going to be like a million people here way more than I think the city can handle um I would sign up for

notify ATL and that will just text you real time updates to your phone if there is some sort of outage or something goes

wrong uh you can get that information

there oh oh yeah and that’s just a picture of what this looked like in my

neighborhood when the outage happened so luckily Manuel’s Tavern is not under a boil water advisory right now otherwise

we wouldn’t have all these great drinks in front of us but when it does occur that’s what it looks like the red area

is under boil water yeah yeah and you were right at the edge I was at the

southern edge of it you were at the northern edge of it so it was really tantalizing it’s like so close to having water

um uh so field inventory and operations like I mentioned um collecting assets

collecting information on those assets you can’t make any of these Maps or make any of these decisions if you don’t have data like we can talk about all this

cool flashy stuff but literally everything just comes down to you having the information um and that’s what you

can do with um you know with GIS with you know tablets or your phone and then

actually right here we have a um handheld GPS unit um who here really knows what how GPS

works and what it does or even what it stands for we got some people um yeah

there so essentially how it works is um there’s a lot of satellites up in space

and it um it doesn’t triangulate I it it uses four satellites that you’re you’re

bouncing a signal from your phone or your device to those satellites and using those four data points it can then

pinpoint your position uh so there’s plenty of these systems out there GPS is

not the only one I think especially in the United States it’s just kind of ubiquitous it was originally developed by uh the military but China has their

own um positioning system uh glonass is a Russian system um and actually I don’t

know if you know right your Congressman but uh GPS and gnss are actually in

pretty bad shape we’re kind of getting killed by China especially and and Russia in in terms of deploying these

positioning satellites a lot of our infrastructure is aging I mean it’s the same story on the ground as it is up in

space with our infrastructure um but that’s you know so critical to everything you do I I use GPS every

single day all the time um so yeah right your Congressman Congress person excuse

me um my uh yeah so I was just going to give a real world example of like how

thankful I am for GPS and GIS and knowing where all this stuff is so uh

there’s some guys that gave us a demo of this new uh water metering

infrastructure it’s called Advanced metering infrastructure so what happened back in the day for you to get a bill

and for your water utility to know how much water you were using um was they would literally go to the box maybe

there’d be a snake I personally more afraid of the black widow spiders that I’ve seen this sake looks kind of

friendly um but they’d open up the box they’d write the number down they’d go back to the billing uh you know customer

service folks and there that’s how they knew how much water was being used a little bit later on they had a kind of

radio system so they could do Drive buys and get multiple houses from a little bit further away and now we’ve got this

great Advanced metering infrastructure that they’ve repl placed they basically put over your pipe it does the same

thing right it measures how much water is flowing through the pike how much your usage is and it allows utilities to

know your pattern of usage so when are you working at home are you using more water at certain times of day what’s

your average daily use so if they see a lot higher average daily use that

probably means there’s a leak that needs to be fixed right or someone left the sprinkler on and isn’t home

with this kind of advanced metering infrastructure they can go fix that lead

quickly and even a lot of utilities not all of them will give get that information to customers so you can pull

up a dashboard and see in real time what your water usage is and be able to fix that leak yourself and also as added

benefit they’ll pay you and give you a credit for if they see you fix that leak

quickly enough so that’s just kind of a cool example of technolog is way better

now and it’s way better for customers and utilities oh and you can see it on your

phone I guess as an app yeah and actually that transitions perfectly into

the real-time data so the connect iot sensors that’s what Maya was just talking about so and I mentioned this

earlier as well uh plenty of communities have those sensors in in pipes in in

streams uh if there’s a flooding event they can they can tell the level of the Stream and if it gets too high uh they

know how to me go to the examples they’ll know to um share this data you

know with um Outlets like Google Maps that hey there’s a flood warning we can and this will all happen automatically

so there’s the data feed of that iot sensor it sends that information to you

know a GIS database somewhere uh based off um you know scripts or or um these

um just these processes that have been put in place it knows hey it’s going to trigger an alert if the water level uh

surpasses a certain point and then um a lot of uh communities partner with

Google um a lot of communities for like traffic information partner with ways um

you know if if a community has a road closure for like a festival downtown they can put that into a data feed and

you know people don’t need to manually report hey this road’s closed the city knows it’s going to be closed and then

it just automatically up dates um ways and Google owns ways and a lot of other

stuff so they can just automatically update that and that’s this is the same concept um so you can see here um if you

can see I know it’s kind of small um but this is a dashboard here that shows uh

water sensor readings of different gauges uh the status of the water sensors are they even working uh average

water levels Uh current water levels by the individual gauges has a map of where all the gauges are and so again all that

data based off uh set of predetermined triggers can then be fed into Emergency Management um um like like the uh notify

ATL it can automatically send out those notifications so you’re not having to worry about you know the delay involved

with somebody having to go out to that stream and be like Yep this is flooded all right better let people know when

you could have known that and let people know hours before and close down the road save people’s lives um you know

help preserve our infrastructure um so what can this should really you know what can you do

next um Maya yeah well I want to add one more thing to the real time that I

there’s a USGS gauge that gives real time streaming video uh and I love

checking it when it rains it’s a Rick Rick and Bacher Creek which is also just super fun to set but that’s my favorite

application of like realtime data and USGS gauges so wanted to throw that out there if you ever want to just see a

stream rising from the safety of your own home you can do that and now that you’re mentioning video that’s got me

excited like there are also other ways especially now with uh computer vision

um you have those iot sensors but if you even have a camera place somewhere like in the airport they have sensors to

count the number of people that are coming in and out uh automatically and then it can automatically update like

TSA wait times and um there’s all sorts of crazy stuff now that you can do with Ai and and computer vision uh to gather

this data yeah I love this slide yeah so to bring it back down I know we’ve

talked a lot about old and new and so I just kind of wanted to bring it back to

the idea of water infrastructure like what is it back in the day we had these

giant aqueducts built by the Romans and you knew very much that that was bringing water from the mountains to

your your city and you were going out walking that 10 minutes to pick up your

water bring it home and so water infrastructure was very inyour face you

saw water Mills on the side of the river because you knew it was picking up that water and using it to power other things

right and nowadays a lot of our water infrastructure even if it’s really big like wastewater treatment plants they’re

behind fences where we don’t see them in our everyday lives there’s tanks and pipes but they’re buried underground and

these beautiful parks that are actually water infrastructure are also hidden in

plain sight so how do we take care of and you know maintain this stuff if we

don’t see it we don’t care about it we don’t know about it so that’s what I love about GIS and all these

visualizations is for all the people every day who are using water but not

necessarily in the weeds like me um it allows you to kind of see the Unseen

absolutely and couple things here I want to talk about just the picture of the mill reminded me about what is this uh 40

slides ago when we were showing the the the the fall line and you know the the pedmont region and the coastal plane um

I’m just a geography nerd so so I love you know thinking about why things are where they are and the mill reminded me

of you know what is it Mak Augusta Columbus um they’re all located where

they are because of that fall line so that’s where the pedmont drops down into the coastal plane there’s a very very

large and very sudden elevation change which then developed many waterfalls

which was then a logical place to put a mill to you know um develop power or

create power essentially to do work without um you know having to be so hard

on the human body and that’s and then those cities develop around that uh so anyway that doesn’t really apply to

anything here I think that’s cool well it does cuz water water is used in so many different

ways and water is everything exctly I need it to live I would go that far as to say

that so now I just kind of wanted to leave you with a couple resources that I

know about honestly me and my co-workers uh use ATL 311 a lot as well if you see

a leak obviously we’ve got all these databases city of Atlanta has all this

information about where things are but they still very much need the Public’s eyes and ears on things so if you’re

walking around your neighborhood you see a missing manhole cover and you think wow I don’t want to walk into that

someone’s GNA break an ankle uh you can go on to a ATL 311 their website chat

you can text them you can call them uh and report it so you know they don’t

know where what the problems are until they’ve been told sometimes sometimes

sometimes they have the real time data but not always so I just wanted to throw that out there and again if you don’t

live in city of Atlanta chances are your water utility has something similar to this where the the public can inform and

kind of be that relationship have that relationship um and also if you scan

this QR code or just go to North Georgia water.org that’s the website that’s run by my um organization and it’s got a lot

of really cool ways to just learn more about your Watershed in general we’ve

got these uh Digital River Basin profiles so you can figure out which River Basin you live in and learn all

kinds of stuff about like na the Natural Science and geology around it but also

its uses um what your water source is if it’s not the chattah huchi or lake laner

um and what’s really great is this new virtual Learning Journey it was built along with the Georgia public

broadcasting agency so if any of you are science Educators or you work with

council members um or even if you just want to learn more about yourself this is a great tool to just learn about

Georgia water where it comes from um it has curriculums attached to every page so

you can have activities and kind of how it’s connected to the Georgia greater curriculum um and it also has videos of

people in different career paths within water so if you have any high schoolers and younger who you want to join a great

industry we definitely need more people water Engineers lab techs uh

communicators about water uh you can learn all about that there uh and of

course if you want to participate in the water policy in your community uh then

we’re always recruiting to to join the Basin advisory councils we’re actually having an orientation later next month

in August so so if you’re super amped up and want to know how water decisions are made in your water basin uh then feel

free to join that and I’ll see you later awesome um so if you’re really

interested in GIS um there’s a couple ways you can learn more get involved uh there are a couple local GIS groups uh a

huge one is actually through the Atlanta region geospatial Community which is run by uh my good friend Ryan Barrett over

at the Atlanta Regional Commission The Arc um completely open to the public I

went there when I hardly knew anything about GIS and everybody there is so kind and welcoming it’s it’s definitely you

know they have a little poster session they typically line up uh presentations a lot of them from local government GIS

but from some you know other um other GIS companies or companies that leverage GIS I think we had one from like a Solar

Company uh one time uh but a lot of cool stuff and the catering is so good and

I’m really not kidding about that it’s so good and it’s free uh so um yeah

definitely recommend you check that out uh and then if you’re into something more casual uh there’s the Metro

metropolitan Atlanta geospatial Society or mags is that as it’s referred to um

that’s more just drinking and talking uh yeah so not really you’re not really going to have any presentations or

anything there but you still you know get to meet some people have some great conversations um it’s just a really good

community and I found that just I don’t think I would be in the G in GIS if it were not for the community because

people really are so welcoming they love to they love to help they love to to educate and um it’s just it’s a it’s a

great Community um and if you’re interested in learning or especially if we have any Educators here um so EZ

offers heavily discounted licensing for nonprofits including science for Georgia who has some of our licenses to do some

uh GIS analysis and work and when I say heavily discounted it’s like $100 a year as a opposed to like $5,000 a year it

would cost for like a normal company um if you just want to screw around with it on your own we have free trials but

there are also personal use licenses if you want to be a little more official with it when I was first learn learning GIS I think I created like 10 different

fake emails to keep going through the 30-day trials each time uh but um which

you know feel free to do that I’m not going to stop you um if you work for a university I know Kenesaw state has a

huge GIS program North Georgia but Georgia state Georgia have GIS like

miners or or at least people doing GIS there in some way shape or form uh emry

uh runs a GIS Day event uh they have folks doing GIS um George Tech Georgia

Tech has a masters in GIS program which I’ve worked with uh them many times a lot of really really smart people there

it was actually a Georgia Tech Research Institute which was my first like real career job that I learned what GIS was

and kind of started me down this path so um I’ll always appreciate that and again if you’re a K12 educator we it just like

everything’s free we give away like stuff that would normally cost like six figures it’s just you know you just have

to manage it but you can use it there’s a school I work with up in North Fulton

the uh Fulton County innovation academy uh it’s a high school up there public high school but brilliant brilliant kids

uh I’ve helped them like integrate some GIS into their curriculum I’m working with a school in cob County soon to help

with that so I’m happy to get involved involved if I have time or if you’re really into it um I’m happy to like

enable you and help you um you can just apply for this online again it’s free it’s very easy but if you need any help

have any questions I’m happy to help and on top of that we have a ton of free training and again if you’re a k

through2 educator we even have uh like a curriculum that we just built uh I was

actually talking with a teacher friend of mine he teaches fifth grade he was teaching first grade uh so now we’re

talking about hey how can we get like make your geography lessons a little more fun and engaging through GIS uh and

we’re talking about there’s like teacher work plans you know worksheets for students and then it and you can like

filter through all these based off grade and knowledge level it’s really really cool and again I can’t stress enough how

free it is so yeah thank

you so yeah definitely thank you Manuel’s Tavern thank you science for Georgia for having us we really

appreciated it and thank all of you for for coming out okay now questions raise your hand if you got a

question I think that means we the presentation was that good no questions oh we do have a question okay okay when

I um when I signed up to come here I thought that maybe y’all would comment a

little bit bit more on why we had a major like three main outbreaks I know like

um the water facility whatever we want to call them they had some sort of thing

they said oh one main went to other I couldn’t understand their explanation at

all and uh I was hoping maybe you could yeah so I knew this would come I tried

to play with it I you know because I knew that’s a lot of people would have that question we don’t work for the city I want to make that very clear that’s

why we tried to steer away from it cuz we didn’t want people to think like oh we’re City officials speaking on this and like an official capacity but you

know my uh probably understand comment better than I could yes yes but yeah that being said I think we can still

help provide like a little bit more clarity there so yeah I can I can start we can kind of Riff Off each other but I

think it’s important to know that not just Atlanta but the entire nation is

under this issue of Aging infrastructure so I really like this graphic cuz it basically just shows like there are

pipes in there in our system that are over a hundred years old some of them are built of tree trunks or uh brick and

mortar uh and some of them are built really really well despite being 100 years old they’re like solid and some of

our y younger pipes are made of things that maybe aren’t so great like maybe

some lead pipes that were cheap at the time and we didn’t know the problems that that might cause um so there’s all

that to say it’s a problem that not just Atlanta but throughout the nation and world are facing of we put all this

stuff in at wildly different times and they have to be maintained and they’re

not being maintained at some level or another um so that’s kind of what this is and then as far as uh water main

breaks I learned this recently but basically um and I I’m not an expert by

any means but a drinking water pipe specifically which is when boil water advisories happen that has to do with

your drinking water um often times that’s caused by a decrease in pressure

so maybe a break causes uh less pressure in the pipes and if the systems are

connected lower pressure here means lower pressure there means lower pressure there and so if you already

have pipes that are older and not as strong as they have been in some cases

the water pressure the water flowing through those pipes is working to hold

the pipes up in a way so when you lose that water pressure it it just is kind

of a crazy ripple effect um so that’s maybe I don’t know in that case uh a

reason another really interesting thing I learned about the 11th Street break that uh Chris was talking about was uh

that pipe was 100ish maybe a a little bit older years old and the hydrant was

built directly on the pipe that is not a best practice we do today today

typically it’s hydrant small pipe valve so you can turn it off if there’s an issue and it doesn’t affect the pipe

that affects everyone else but unfortunately back when that pipe was put in over a hundred years ago on 11th

Street uh they didn’t do that so when the hydrant went the entire pipe went um

so that was a really interesting case for me that I didn’t know about because I haven’t been working in water quite

that long and we luckily have better designs now um do you have anything to

add Chris sure well I’ll just talk about you know again being the gis person how

GIS plays into this is um you know we know we have a lot of old infrastructure

all across the country we know it sort of in our heads but do we actually know

where they are how old they are all this very specific information about them have they been inspected recently you

know in a lot of cases no like we know broadly we have aging infrastructure but like to get down to

the specifics that’s where GIS comes in some of those things I was talking about earlier uh there are systems if there is

a main break um you know there are uh I

don’t want to get too into the weeds but essentially there are like there’s an information system specific to water

utilities that you can use to make like extremely quick decisions if something

does go wrong and also be much more proactive um in replacing infrastructure

before it breaks because um I will say I know I kind of ribbed Atlanta a little bit a couple times but I know the people

who work there in the on the water team a lot of them are very smart and well-meaning but they’re understaffed

you know they don’t have the resources and it’s really I would say if you want to complain you know talk to your

council person uh there’s a great uh GIS map for finding out who your council person is uh based off your address and

talk to them about it I know again not a city official but I know they’re working on some things now uh of course there

was just the spast uh tax that was renewed for water um but it just we need

to let our elected officials know that it’s a priority for us um and then that

trickles down to like the boots on the ground and and making that

change um one add one more thing sorry and that’s like I’m an engineer not a

communicator but there one of the things I don’t think is communicated and that maybe y’all since

you’re interested in science uh would maybe understand better than the wider

Community is the time it takes to get the all clear for a boiled water

advisory it doesn’t always mean that there’s a problem with the water but what it the reason it takes maybe 24

hours to get the answer back is they literally take a water sample and they have a peach tree dish and the test that

they do on that water takes 24 hours for incubation period so you know I know

it’s frustrating because I was in it waiting for water both in my office and at home to know that it was safe and

that you know I could just take it out of the tap again but there’s both an infrastructure and a scientific reason

for some of that delay hope hope that

helps um one thing I can say is that science for George has been looking into specifically is that um the city of

Atlanta was under a consent decree to clean or to fix their sewer systems so

more of their water infrastructure money for the last few years have been going to sewer rather than drinking water um

that’s going to be changing soon with the new spast and everything like that um um with this so that should hopefully

be better we’re entering in the last year of that consent decree for the City of Atlanta um because they got an

extension to get everything done um so that’s at least going to be somewhat changing

soon um yes any idea on how much water we’re

losing for leaking from old infrastructure because I think Nationwide it’s thought about

10% yeah so I don’t don’t have the numbers but I know they’re out there so if you do some Googling I bet you’ll get

it but um I do know I’ve been part of every utility like they don’t want to

lose that water they’ve spent millions of dollars treating it and getting it to you so any water from the treatment pant

that doesn’t make it to your homes they aren’t charging for so to be clear they

also want to find those and there’s a lot of audits and um technology that

goes into finding those leaks and quantifying it but it’s it’s really

tough to do to be quite Frank

yeah yeah yeah absolutely and I mean water has ions in it right so it’s kind

of got some magnetism and electricity in it so uh in the old times before he had

CCTV and like all this cool technology someone would just bring a pro or a magnet and that’s how they would find

where the water was running which I think is super fascinating I’m glad I don’t have to do that but there are

ways I have so many questions I just graduated with an mph at environmental health um and so I’m but I was in

Michigan so I’m wondering if you um know about the combin S overflow situation

here and um because there there’s a huge problem because of the controls my

understanding at least is that the controls that they put on it to be in compliance with the Clean Water Act and

not pollute like the great lakes and other water sources causes a lot of the flooding that happens in Detroit and in

other regions in the Midwest and so yeah I’m just curious if that’s part of the problem with flooding here in Atlanta or

yeah no that’s a that’s a great question um and Atlanta has a combined sewer

overflow that’s a lot of where the consent that um Patrick was talking about came from but it’s not just an

Atlanta thing in fact there’s a lot of most of the older cities in the country

um if we want to go back way far remember the chera outbreak sewers used

to just be how do we get waste as fast as we can away from the people after

they’ve used them which were Rivers like the temps and then we got a little bit

smarter and put pipes in right but the pipes were just for Wastewater which is

based on how many people were putting their to you know being set up with

toilets and sinks and so as the population grows there’s more waste that goes into the same sized pipes if we

haven’t replaced them and in addition to that as we talked about Atlanta and

Georgia have both droughts and large storm events right so combined sewer

overflow the combined sewer system basically means that in big rain events

there’s both sewer water from toilets and there’s also storm water that might

go into the same pipes so if we don’t have streams what do we have we have sewer pipes so a lot of this

infrastructure was built before all the development before there was more people

and so the pipes sometimes just get overwhelmed because it’s not built to handle the amount the quantity of water

coming in so that’s kind of the definition um Atlanta’s dealing with the

same thing but maybe not in quite the same way as Michigan some cities deal with it by um literally digging up the

pipes and making them bigger so that they can handle both storm water and waste water at the same time uh if we’re

lucky they’ll do something different and have storm water infrastructure separate

from sewer infrastructure but if a lot of you have noticed you don’t get charged a storm water fee on your bill

typically you only get charged for waste water and drinking water so it’s kind of a what comes first the chicken or the

egg so you know if you don’t have storm water infrastructure and the bigger

storms and more storm water is what’s causing the overflows then you know we

got to build that out in other ways and then yeah sorry I just want to point out um some municipalities do have storm

water fees now not all of them I know and often times they don’t charge residents they’ll charge businesses

because often times you know an impervious surface just a road you know concrete a you know a surface you cannot

permeate it’s what an impervious surface is uh but a lot of times they use GIS tools to calculate what’s the percentage

of impervious surface uh based off this data we have and then we charge you an amount based on that um so some

communities are seeing this I know like Decor does the city of Decor does this and some more Forward Thinking communities but

yeah it’s not not everywhere certainly and my favorite thing to talk

about is gray infrastructures like concrete pipes there’s also this thing called Green infrastructure so instead

of building out the pipes for this larger quantity of water why don’t we just hold it where it falls and not let

it get into our pipe system to begin with so that’s where if you see any of the development on Peach Tree Street and

you see all these little divots where there’s going to be trees and plants um

those are meant to hold some of that water so keep it out of the pipes in the

first place and hold it where it is and let it infiltrate or you know be used in some other measure right being collect

collecting it from the roofs and using it in toilets that’s something Georgia Tech does and a couple other big big um

institutes have tried um so there’s a lot of solutions but again like everything else it’s

money sorry yeah any more

questions you have another question I guess that’s okay um I’m wondering uh how much you

see the bipartisan infrastructure law as influencing a lot of this because I I think that that is going to be huge

given that the last like Federal influx of dollars was like 70 years ago oh yeah

you guys this is like the best time to be a water engineer everyone I talk to

who’s older than me is like this is a once in a lifetime opportunity projects that utilities and cities have been

literally sitting on for decades this is like FDR big it’s so insane how many

projects we’re doing there’s literally not enough people to do it in the time that they’ve given us which is really

unfortunate because there’s some cool projects that are being overlooked because there’s just no way that it can

be designed and constructed uh before 2026 which is when the the funding runs

out so I would say the funding has made a huge huge difference it is super exciting and hopefully there is more to

come with a little bit longer of a deadline because as you all probably have realized construction it’s taking a

lot longer and everything’s more expensive than when that bill got passed but yeah it’s a it’s a re I cannot

overstate how big a deal that is and you know there’s specific thing like I know

uh the belt lines will be or complete except for the northern northern end where it’s very complex uh by the World

Cup that one wouldn’t have happened without the infrastructure bill um and one thing I also work with the belt line

I just want to say I think a lot of people think oh it’s just a sidewalk but there’s storm water and all these like engineering there’s Brownfield cleanup

there’s all this stuff involved it’s not just like hey let’s just pave a sidewalk it’s much more complicated than that but

that is something that’s directly impacting our community um getting the Belt Line 90% complete uh by the World

Cup and then we actually have the funding for the north end but it’s just all these elevated Pathways and stuff to

get over like the Norfolk uh CSX properties that’s just rather complex

it’s just can’t get it done in time but yeah that’s been huge and yeah I would encourage everybody to vote in November

please vote please um so again thank you Chris thank

you Maya yeah thank you um thank you all for coming she had a question too but

one statistic I’ll leave you with on this is uh I got it from an AJC article

so blame them not me um Atlanta replaces about 3.5 miles of

drinking water infrastructure every year to complete all the infrastructure in

Atlanta it will take 500 years so new money coming in new

projects working hopefully this will get better

and then before we leave um I have one more thing for

you do you want to go do this okay go ahead sorry Alexandre has something for you oh yeah I forgot to introduce myself

at the beginning I’m Alexandra I’m I’m on the

board um so yeah once again to your servers um this isn’t going to the next

thing but so if for anything like me um you might attend an event like this and

wonder how you can get involved so we can’t accomplish our mission without supporters like you guys so I wanted to

give you um some ways to get involved this is a special moment in science for georg’s history where as you might

imagine one of our biggest challenges as an Atlanta based nonprofit serving the entire state of Georgia is really

expanding out into the state but we are doing that we’re going to start having more events across across the state we

have the catalyzer um monthly meetings which are virtual so that people across the state can attend

um and we’ve expanded our board to people in Augusta and valdasta and as we

mentioned the environmental justice conference will be in Basta next summer so if you’re looking for ways to support

our work there’s three main ways one stay informed so sign up for our

newsletters um they’re on our website get your friends and family across the

state to sign up cuz we are Statewide and you can also buy signs for Georgia swag so increase awareness and get some

street cred um number two volunteer with us so we have a strong catalyzer Network

there are plenty of virtual and iners volunteer opportunities so you can get informed by signing up for that and

lastly of course donate so the vast majority of our operating costs Go to

paying our amazing employees salaries these events could not take place without Patrick and Frankie’s sweat um tears and

tears um so you all came out tonight because science has a special place in your heart and these people live and

breathe science every day on behalf of all Georgians so please help us put food on their tables um we have QR codes

everywhere go to science for georgia.org make a donation even better make a recurring payment um and help us

continue moving our mission forward so we have more of these events coming in

August we’re going to have one on volcanoes um P know think so um and that

one will also be at manuals not all of our events are at manuals we’re trying to mix them up around state but that one will be and we have a lot more events

coming out this fall so subscribe to our events calendar and join us at our next

one thank you very much I am the human events calendar so talk to me if you want to know about more where to stop

um one of the fun things we will be doing we are doing multiple comedy shows this fall um in September we’ll be at

tus those of you who have been there before know that we are sitting underneath the back end of a dinosaur

and telling copper light jokes so that one’s pretty fun um but f one thing we

were doing new this year um we are going to be doing a cancer um fundraiser a

cancer research fundraiser um in October down at Wild Heaven

uh we’re calling it malignant humor um so please come to that U it will

probably it will be a little bit more costly because everything’s going to be in a donation we’re explaining the proceeds with um Emory cancer research

so that’ll be super fun um and yeah I think that’s everything sign this QR

code will take you to our website where you can find out more information um and yeah pick my brain reach out to me let

me know if you want are an expert in something and want to give a talk um we also with the climate survival training

we are doing more Hands-On things as well we just had a talk about mushrooms um and uh growing mushrooms on your own

logs and things of that sort we’ll be doing many different things in the new year and if you’ve missed a talk check

out our YouTube channel we have videos of all these talks every time we’re putting them up Frankie did a lot of

work getting all the stuff that was recorded up and now we’re streaming to YouTube so we’re live right now on the

internet um but that’s going to be ending because I’m going to stop talking so thank you very much and uh have a

great night appreciate it [Applause]