The Epiphany!

Lauren, Jill, and I in Chelsea, MA after an interview

Shortly after completing a majority of the scheduled interviews, our group started going into analysis mode.  We started to think about the direction of our project and on the changes that we would make to ensure that our project met what the city of Chelsea wanted for the final project.  On September 19^th, our group returned to the Worcester Community Project Center (WCPC) and we started to type out and go over as a group what we were completing.  We realized, the epiphany, that our project like we thought was indeed going the way we wanted it to, just we were able to switch the focus of the GIS mapping to ensure that our final deliverable would indeed be used by the city. 

One of the considerations that our team thought was interesting from interviewing the developers was that the scope was very different of which considered climate change and which did not.  Personally, I was very impressed with how the interviews went and with each interview, we learned more and more and attained useful information that could help us achieve our final goal.  With our project objectives now tightened and more oriented, the project will be more clear and informative for the city of Chelsea’s use.  There was a lot of discussion to get all of the final ideas to the surface and a lot of brain power, but I am very excited for how our project will be completed.

Jill, Santiago, and I working hard at the WCPC

Our team will be wrapping up our final interviews this upcoming week and by the end of the week, we should have our deliverables.  The ideas are flowing, the GIS maps are being overlayed,  and the interviews are being analyzed.  This will ensure that our deliverables will be useful for the boards of Chelsea, along with the educating factor that goes along with them.  This is any dream that the project that you spent months on will actually make an impact.  It will be electrifying to see how the final product turns out.

Interviews!

Lunch at Quincy Market after meeting a developer on State St.

Last week we started contacting developers and city board members as well as one student from Harvard who completed a similar project. The positive feedback we received from people was very exciting. Most responded within a day and said they were happy to meet with us.

This week we have already have completed six interviews and have gotten a lot of really good information. The developers were really helpful in allowing us to understand their side of the problem. They want to limit their costs when building as much as possible and don’t see a need to spend extra on adapting their building to climate change unless given a good reason or incentive. The boards said that they wanted to see more changes to the city that would protect the city from the risks of climate change but at the same time they did not want to deter developers from wanted to build there because of added high costs that other cities don’t have. One of the most exciting interviews we have had was with Erica Blonde, a Harvard graduate student who last year did a project very similar to ours in Chelsea. It was great to hear what type of research her group did and what type of adaptations they came up with. She is going to send along some of the information that she and her group used that she feels will be beneficial to our group. She was very excited about the project and already expressed interest in coming to see our group’s presentation at the Boston Public Library.

             We plan to start taking all of the results from our interviews into a matrix that will allow us to analyze the important information in a way that will help us create our guidelines for the boards. Overall, I am excited to see our project finally coming together with some concrete results and not just the literature research that we have already done. 

A picture in front of the apartment complex of the developer we met with

ArcGIS: the beginning

Lauren and I working on GIS mapping

After our GIS tutorial with Prof. Mathisen, we began working with ArcGIS to look at the information available in MASS GIS. We started by importing the maps and then looking at the diverse information fields that these GIS maps have. We also clipped out all the other towns' information that we don't need. We are still trying to decide which fields are especially relevant to our project. In the picture you can see a map of the city of Chelsea. Learning to use ArcGIS was a little challenging but a lot of fun! ArcGIS is a very powerful program, and I enjoy using it.

Interview Preparation

Over the past week, our group has been preparing to interview with Chelsea, MA board members and developers who have projects in the Everett Avenue area. I am excited to begin our interviewing process, and I think that we will gain a lot of valuable information from those who we are talking to. We have set up a set of specific questions to ask in our interviews. To help organize and be ready for our upcoming interviews, we began separating our general questions into more specific groups. We tailored questions specific to each board and developer, as well as deciding which questions should be asked to all. Here you can see Santiago and I organizing our questions and deciding who they are revelant for.


Me and Santiago organizing our questions

while being careful not to disturb the MIT Sea Grant fish

GIS Tutorial

Our team and Prof. Mathisen.

On September 5^th , we had the opportunity to attend to a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) tutorial taught by our advisor Prof. Mathisen. Prof. Mathisen incorporates GIS in his courses at WPI. This tutorial was aimed to instruct us in how to use ArcGIS tools to manipulate and create maps. During the tutorial, Prof. Mathisen utilized ArcGIS to overlay different maps that were downloaded from the MassGIS database. The files we downloaded were ZIP files that contained different formats such as image data, vector data, etc., and we had to search and find the one that was the most useful to us. We learned how to change the colors of maps, display some of the maps features, obtain some of the data that is in the map files, select specific layers in a map, etc. Some of the maps we looked at were: the contour data, town outlines and coastal line maps. Additionally, we learned that we must add a North arrow and a scale to the maps we produce for our report.Thanks for the help Prof. Mathisen :)! 

FEMA Emergency Preparedness Day - Boston, MA.

Keith talking to Nulise, the FEMA mitigation expert

When our team was leaving Boston on September 4^th and arrived at South Station, we noticed that there was a FEMA disaster preparedness table.  The table consisted of fliers and information on what the general public could do be smart in many types of natural disasters.  I first came into contact with Robert Keller, the Regional Preparedness Liaison for the Boston area.  We started to talk about the project a bit and he gave many informative fliers on Emergency Supply Lists, how to prepare for floods, how to prepare for hurricanes, as well as different alert systems that are in place.  Getting a basic knowledge and just getting the levels of preparedness up can help avert a serious crisis.  Robert then informed me that outside by the radio truck, there was a mitigation expert so I went to seek her help.

When I arrived outside, I asked if the mitigation expert was around.  I was kindly greeted by Nulise Francois who is the emergency mgt. specialist for Region 1 with FEMA.  We talked a bit about our project and I brought her to meet the team and we all started to talk about what her experience was and on how she could help our project.  She actually had done some work in Chelsea on lightening which was interesting and she offered to help give our team guidance if we did need it later on.  Before our team left, around the corner of the table, there were some cool refrigerator magnets that informed people about Boston flooding so we had to take one J.  We found it very exciting to see other people doing work in the same field so we wanted to share our project with them.  We have yet to decide if the information is relevant to our project but it was very inspiring to talk to them.  It was another aspect that we were considering and it is cool to see an organization do outreach to the public.

Meeting with Sponsors from Sea Grant and Chelsea 9/3/14

Wednesday we had our first sponsor meeting with Julie Simpson, Judith Pederson, John DePriest, John Gelcich, Seth Tuler and Paul Mathisen. Our meeting was very productive. We now have a very clear idea of what our final deliverable will be based on what we have heard from Mr. DePriest and Mr. Gelcich. We will be providing best management practices to the planning board, the zoning board, and the conservation commission. We received a list of contacts from Mr. Gelcich to be able to contact and interview developers with questions.

            A lot of ideas were thrown around. Much of what was discussed was the wording of what we right. We have had a few problems with choosing how to word our objectives. We have changed our first objective from assessing vulnerability to identifying vulnerability.

            Our project is much more focused and clarified. With this in mind our project seems much more attainable, and something that will be extremely helpful to the city of Chelsea. I am very excited to get back to working this term!