Title
GIS and California’s Industries
Author

Name
Laurel Warddrip American River College, Geography 350: Data Acquisition in GIS; Spring 2009 Contact Information (1001 I Street 15th Floor Sacramento, CA 95814, 916-341-5531, email:lwarddrip@waterboards.ca.gov)
Abstract

Using street address data provided by the State Water Resource Control Board’s (SWRCB) CIWQS database 66 addresses were transferred from the tabular database using a geocoder and created into a GIS layer for possible use by the public and governmental sectors.
Introduction

Ever feel like the government hoards information? Where are those Auto Dismantlers in my neighborhood? The purpose of this project is to map the County of Sacramento’s auto dismantler facilities in a GIS geodatabase to provide public access to the information and provide a tool to government staff. The importance of this is that currently there is no public access to industrial facilities that are permitted in California, what they make and where they are located. Under their Industrial General Permit for stormwater, facilities are required to submit information about their facility, including their site address. Using a geodatabase (MS Access) and an address locator, I should be able to map most of these facilities. There are over 10,000 facilities in California alone, so I will use a subset of these facilities by using only auto dismantler facilities (Specific industry type) located in the State of California. Once this data is exported to GIS I will be able to query out the data I need
Background

The State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) of California is required to regulate the discharges of stormwater from a variety of sources. One source is from industrial facilities. Under the federal National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits are issued for facilities based on their industrial activity. A discharger applies for the permit, pays their fee, follows the permit guide lines, and is assigned a Waste Discharge Identification Number (WDID#). This number is unique to any facility in the State of California. Regulators can make an enforcement action on a site when they are not following the permit guidelines or discharging polluted water (stormwater runoff). Industrial Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) Codes Industrial facilities are grouped under a specific SIC code which is based on the type of activities the industry carries out. There are 29 basic categories of codes and the auto dismantlers fall under the SIC code 5015 for automobile salvage yards. Once a facility knows what SIC code they fall under, they also know which analytical water parameters they must test for and submit to the Water Boards. For SIC code 5015 testing of their stormwater discharge must be done for pH, SSC, TSS, Oil/Grease or TOC, and then Fe, Pb, and Al. GIS will enable industrial facility information to be linked to their spatial location in California as provide government regulators the ability to use the data to answer questions about stormwater and California’s industries
Methods

Data Collection

The State Water Board uses and online database called California Integrated Water Quality System (CIWQS) to store their stormwater data (not limited to industrial NPDES data). In this database users can access information about industrial facilities (reports, contact information, violations) and permittees can submit online reports and check prmit status. I used CIWQS to query out all industrial facilities currently permitted in California with the SIC code 5015. I decided to query out the facilities only located in Sacramento later using GIS. I decided that I would import the excel tablular data from CIWQS into MS Access so I could compare that exported list to a list of facilities that CIWQS reported as being the number of facilites in California with the SIC code 5015.

I got 901 records out of the CIWQS database and 901 records in the MS Access database

Excel-MS Access

Once I got the data into Excel, I imported it into a personal geodatabase (MS Access) where I could further explore the data and prepare it for an easy merge into GIS.

MS Access Queries

I used MS Access to query out industrial facilities that fit the statement:

SIC 1 (main SIC code)

Like “5015”

County text

Like “sacramento”

I got a total of 66 records and i would then use this to see how many hits I get in the GIS database after the addresses are coded in

QA/QC

Once I get the number of facilites GIS has for Sacramento I will compare this number to the 66 facilities in CIWQS to see how many addresses the geocoder could not find in Sacramento County

GIS and the State Water Boards

The State Water Board has a number of licenses the staff is allowed to use for free. I have GIS uploaded on my computer at work and am able to use their server and .shp files. In GIS I included the following layers:

WBGIS.Counties.shp which provided me the counties for the state and an outline of California

WBGIS.Transportation_Highways.shp to orient the map user with where the facilities are located

WBGIS.City_Areas.shp to allow the use of correlating the location of the auto dismantler facilities to city centers

Address Locator

I still did not have my facility addresses in GIS and I did not have at my disposal lat/long data. I knew that as a last resort I could manually find the lat/long of each facility, but I knew that the State Water Board had a good address geocoder so I ran the addresses through the coder. All of the facilities seemed to have working addresses, but the coder was not able to match all of the addresses (showed 80% matching). I could of at this point tried to match the remaining facilities, but since the data was statewide, I was not sure how many addresses would be missing in Sacrmaneto County alone, so I waited until I had doen an attribute query

GIS queries

I used the select by attributs tool in GIS to select facilites that had the SIC code 5015 and were in Sacramento, all of the sites I had in my layer "lit" up so the 80% accuracy issue did not apply to the specific data subset (Sacramento County) I was using. Once the layer was in GIS I changed the symbols to cars to help the user identify the facility types. I set the symbol at an easy to see size 12.
The screen-shot to the right shows what the State of California's CIWQS database looks like. Users can use the various questions to form queries and find the data they want in the online database
my green map
The screen-shot to the right shows the address geocoder that the State Waterboards uses to code street addresses in GIS
my green map
The screen-shot to the right shows the actual data geocoded into GIS. The map shows the County of Sacramento with facilites that have the SIC code 5015 while they are being selected using an attributes query in GIS.
my green map
The screen-shot to the right shows the actual data geocoded into GIS. The map shows the County of Sacramento with facilites that have the SIC code 5015 while after they were selected using the attributes query in GIS.
my green map
The screen-shot to the right shows the actual data geocoded into GIS. The map shows the final data set of facilites that have the SIC code 5015 in the county of Sacramento after they were selected using the attributes query in GIS. Once the data had been selected, I made the selected features into thier own layer and removed the other layer from the layers set
my green map
Results
I found that there were 66 industrial facilities in the County of Sacramento that fall under the SIC code 5015

Analysis
The result of 66 facilites could be inaccurate due to the fact that some facilites do not have an industrial permit and therefore are not part of the dataset. This would require a lot of field work and justification to go after "non-filers" to get more information. Some facilities may be found though the phone book or online "yellowpages". Another source of error is that some facilites have more than one SIC code and some of the facilites may of dropped out in the CIWQS search.
Conclusions
To truely make this map user-friendly the map would have to be coded into an online map such as Google maps or the like. If the project were to go further this would have to be take on by someone with computer programming, GIS and web-based computer skills.
References



SWRCB Website. Storm Water. 2007 http://www.swrcb.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/stormwater.

SWRCB. California Integrated Water Quality System. 2008. https://ciwqs.waterboards.ca.gov.

ESRI. ESRI Online Support. 2009. http://support.esri.com.

Demers, Michael N. Fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2009

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