INTEGRATING GIS AND PORTAL TECHNOLOGIES FOR ASSESSING
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH IMPACTS OF HURRICANE KATRINA
I. Zaslavsky, K. Pezzoli, D. Valentine, A. Lin, H. Sarabia, M. Ellisman, R. H. Tukey (UCSD,
San Diego, CA, USA), A Hull, M.L Miranda, (Duke University, Durham, NC, USA),
M. Avakian (MDB, Inc., Durham, NC, USA)
ABSTRACT: The goals of the Hurricane Response Portal project include assessment of human
exposures in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, potential exposures under different redevelopment strategies, design of remediation strategies, and collaboration among government, research
and community stakeholders in monitoring human and environmental health impacts. A comprehensive
environmental health GIS that can be accessed and customized by different research groups via a secure
portal environment, is the core component of the project. We demonstrate the functionality and benefits
of the portal, the data layers available to date, and review the architecture and technical issues of
integrating several spatial data servers and portal technologies. The discussion is followed by an outline
of research projects supported by the portal.
INTRODUCTION
Nearly 650 thousand persons lived in areas that were either flooded or experienced catastrophic,
extensive or moderate damage during hurricane Katrina, according to FEMA estimates. Over thirteen
hundred people lost their lives, and total economic losses are likely to exceed $125 billion.
As many of the displaced families are rebuilding their residences, human and environmental
health issues move to the forefront of research and re-development agendas. The release of contaminants
into floodwaters, and their transport throughout urbanized areas, has significantly increased risks of toxic
exposure in some hot spots. Some of these environmental health concerns are associated with petroleum
production, extraction and storage, mining, agricultural production, construction operations, chemical
plants and other primary and secondary industries in abundance in New Orleans and the Mississippi delta
prior to the Katrina disaster. At the same time, the flooding of thousands of homes and scores of schools
may be creating indoor environments that threaten human respiratory and neurological health through the
growth of mold and other bioaeroallergens. All of these exposures are taking place within the context of
high psychosocial stress and, for many, low socioeconomic status – conditions which many studies have
shown exacerbate the effects of adverse environmental exposures.
With relatively scarce water, sediment and air quality sampling, and fragmented studies of
environmental impact, potential public health consequences of resettlement remain largely unknown. A
comprehensive assessment of environmental health impacts of the hurricane requires that measurements
obtained in different studies are combined, additional water and sediment sampling is conducted, and the
identified contaminated areas are related to population variables in models of human exposure and health
risks, with results made available to local communities and developers.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Hurricane Response Portal
project establishes an online interactive system to address the challenges listed above. It brings together
toxicologists, computer scientists, public health researchers, geographers and planners, in an attempt to
organize and “spatially-relate” available data for the affected area. The goals of the project include
assessment of human exposures in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, potential exposures under
different re-development strategies, design of remediation strategies, and involvement of a wide array of
local and regional stakeholders in monitoring environmental health impacts. Creating a comprehensive
environmental health GIS and integrating it in a secure web portal is the main technical component of the
project. After the description of the technical underpinnings of the portal, including its architecture,
functionality and available data, we present the environmental health projects currently being
implemented within the portal. We conclude with a summary and outline of future work.
RESEARCH PORTALS AND ONLINE GIS
The rationale for a GIS-based research portal. Collaborative research portal technologies are emerging
as a means to provide a configurable online research space to multiple researchers and groups, helping
them deal with information overload. The NIEHS research portal is designed to make the environmental
health sciences data and technologies more accessible to those in need (e.g., researchers, government
agencies, non-profit organizations). Specifically, it addresses the following four goals: (1) Assessment of
human exposures that occurred in the aftermath of the hurricane, (2) Evaluation of the potential for future
exposures in order to inform development of strategies to reduce or eliminate such exposures, (3)
Identification and assessment of contaminated areas in order to inform development of remediation
strategies, and (4) Establishment of programs to monitor/evaluate human and environmental health
impacts.
The portal environment that the NIEHS Hurricane Response Portal is built on provides members
of the research community with a flexible framework in which to collaborate with research partners and
conduct analysis and visualization using a variety of datasets and web-based tools. Parts of the portal are
open to the public, while others are reserved for individual and project research spaces. The secure area of
the portal can be used by researchers to upload and integrate their own data into the existing datasets
available within the portal, which can then be viewed or manipulated by other members of their defined
research group. Custom tools specific to a particular project can also be built into the portal allowing
researchers to utilize common applications across multiple projects and collaborators, while preserving
security throughout.
This collaborative workspace for researchers is intended to be a tool that can help link projects
centered on environmental health without each research group having to set up and maintain a variety of
datasets and IT infrastructure. These projects initially include online Geographic Information System
support for NIEHS asthma studies (the HEAL project – see section 4.1) and for spatial analysis of
contaminated sediments (section 4.2), but will expand to additional environmental health topics. The
portal provides a great advantage to researchers that are considering collaborative projects because each
workgroup would only be responsible for whatever specific data and tools they may need for their project.
At the same time, groups would be able to utilize a common set of data and tools provided through the
portal. This eliminates the need for each research group to design, build, and maintain their own
collaborative system and instead customize a common framework to suit the needs of their specific
research project. This will also remove the need for maintaining multiple duplicate data sets especially
those of general interest, providing base map information, etc. Additional benefits of the portal
organization include the ability to:




create collaborative workspaces quickly and easily (including document and dataset exchange,
discussion groups, forums, etc.) and publish them online for use by internal and external user
communities;
facilitate structured and secure information exchange and knowledge sharing between
collaborators, regardless of their physical location. Users will be able to place their data sets in a
secure managed environment, where if desired these datasets can be shared with collaborators,
discovered on search requests, etc.;
use advanced information management, analysis and visualization applications, and connect
different applications in personal research workflows;
have search and query access to multiple distributed and separately maintained databases, to
alleviate duplication and remove data maintenance hassles; the different databases can be
accessed via a single logon mechanism, removing the hassle of logging in to each database
separately and thus providing an easier platform for integrating disparate information;


synchronize user information from existing directories (i.e. MyProxy, LDAP);
within the same system, receive access authorization to computing resources that are
normally not available to regular web users: supercomputers, clusters, large data archives.
System architecture. The online GIS application is built over a large collection of spatial data layers
served via ESRI’s ArcIMS and ERMapper’s Image Web Server, with Oracle databases and large grid
storage space as the backend. In addition, street data are served via a dedicated WMS service, and
navigation support is provided via Inxight’s Vizserver. The front-end components: the online map viewer
and the Inxight’s StarTree hyperbolic tree visualization application are integrated in a GridSphere-based
Web portal which also supports a variety of browse, query and collaboration tools. Standard components
of the GridSphere portal also enable local decision-makers and communities to contribute data, participate
in discussions, and maintain research and collaboration workspaces (see Figure 1).
This infrastructure was rapidly put together by leveraging portal components originally developed
within the UCSD Telescience project (https://telescience.ucsd.edu/). From an end-user perspective, a
Telescience portal provides an end-to-end, single sign-on solution for collaborative scientific research that
integrates users with resources and applications with unified security and without prohibitive complexity.
From an applications developer perspective, the Telescience ATOMIC (Application to Middleware
Interaction Component) provides a service-based API fabric that streamlines application integration with
core Grid middleware. The portal includes a number of standard-compliant application components
(portlets), for collaborative data and information management (i.e. Grid-based data and job management,
GIS-based data management, personal workspace personalization and collaborative message boards).
Public site
Sediments Proj
HEAL
Other...
Gridsphere Portal
Services: user management and authentication; query; map generation, etc.
ArcIMS services
WMS services
Image web server
Visualization server
Oracle, grid storage
Figure 1. System architecture.
Available data and analytical functionality. The online Geographic Information System, a core
component of the NIHES portal, assembles spatially-registered data for Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi,
with higher resolution layers available for areas affected by the two most severe 2005 hurricanes, Katrina
and Rita. The information is extracted from publicly available sources and organized in the following
groups:

Post-hurricane project-related data (sediment sampling locations - for the sediments project, and
open school locations – for the HEAL project);






Potential contaminant sources: EPA Toxic Release Inventory facilities (in particular, metals and
metal compounds, hazardous air pollutants, sources of carcinogens and PBTs); multiple types of
industrial and agricultural facilities, and oil and gas facilities (including gas stations, oil and gas
wells and platforms, refineries, storage facilities, and lube plants and pipelines);
Electric facilities and drinking water intakes;
Hurricane damage: Katrina and Rita damage for all available dates (including impassable bridges
and roads, and different degrees of damage), extent of oil spills and water contamination, extent
and duration of flooding, debris, and estimated replacement costs;
Demographic data: racial composition and income stratification by census tracts and block
groups;
Base map layers: states, counties and cities; urban areas, streets and landmarks, hydrologic layers,
and elevation;
Imagery layers: 1m aerial photography for New Orleans taken in September 2005, 15m
Terracolor imagery, 1m Terraserver aerial photographs.
Each of the vector layers can be downloaded from the portal, and includes a metadata description
(Figure 2). Users can navigate spatial layers and explore layer metadata using StarTree (Figure 3)
hyperbolic tree software from Inxight, Inc. (www.inxight.com). In addition to metadata management, the
current version of the GridSphere-based online mapping environment provides a range of map navigation,
address geocoding, query and spatial selection tools, including Web portal which provides a means for
local decision-makers and communities to contribute data, participate in discussions, and maintain
research and collaboration workspaces. As an example of online-mapping functionality available through
the public section of the portal, Figure 4 demonstrates selection of TRI facilities within 1 mile of drinking
water intakes. Password-protected sections of the portal may provide access to additional resources and
custom functions. These secure areas of the portals help users collaborate in specific projects, such as the
two projects described in the following section.
PROJECTS SUPPORTED BY THE PORTAL
There are several spots within the areas impacted by the hurricane that deserve attention of
environmental health professionals, including areas affected by Murphy oil spill in St. Bernard Parish, the
area near the Agriculture street landfill, the heavily flooded Holy Cross and Lower Ninth Ward districts
of New Orleans, the Thompson-Hayward Facility in Carrollton, etc. The portal is designed to support
analysis of environmental health impacts in these areas, however, portal applications to date have focused
on the following two respiratory health projects.
Head-off Environmental Asthma in Louisiana (HEAL). The floods caused by Hurricane Katrina and
Rita left many homes in the Gulf Region inundated, leading to abundant mold growth (according to CDC,
as much as 46% of homes inspected had mold growth). The degradation of indoor/ outdoor air quality and
disruption of the healthcare delivery system had significant effects on children living with asthma, which
is already the most common chronic disease among children. The HEAL section of the portal supports an
epidemiological study and examination of genetic and environmental factors of asthma, focusing on
implementation of a case management program for children with asthma in the impacted region.
Specifically, the online GIS within the HEAL part is designed to examine schools that re-opened after the
hurricane, as well as the populations and households served by those schools, with respect to the extent of
sustained flood damage and potential chemical pollution.
Contaminated Sediment Case Studies and Applications. Testing of soil and sediment for contaminants
in flooded areas, in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricanes, by government agencies, NGOs and researchers
revealed both new and potentially pre-existing issues of concern. To support integration of sediment
sampling data from different sources (in particular, over 430 sites with EPA and other measurements),
Figure 2. Sample layer metadata in the hurricane response portal.
with hurricane damage and potential pollution sources information, the portal hosts the “sediments”
research space and an online GIS. The system is designed to enable analysis of spatial patterns in
contaminated sediments and help prioritize selection of additional sampling sites as well as provide
relevant information for risk assessment and remediation.
CONCLUSION
Leveraging technologies developed in several previous biomedical and spatial data integration
projects, most notably the Telescience, the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN), and the
“Research Translation” and “Community Outreach” activities within the NIEHS’ Superfund Basic
Research Program (SBRP), helped bring the Hurricane Response Portal online quickly and efficiently.
The development of the portal is a work in progress. Once the technical foundation, specifically the
integration between the GridSphere portal framework and the online GIS, is complete we can focus on the
development of collaborative research spaces and providing online data and GIS tools supporting
particular research designs.
To be successful, the technical aspects of the system must be developed in concert with the kind
of social capital (networks, trust, contacts) necessary for collaboration. Developing a system that can
address technical challenges within the realm of existing legal-institutional, cultural, economic and
political constraints is a major challenge. Research portal technology is an important enabling tool in
mediating concerns of different stakeholder groups, which should prove useful in collaborative and
partnership-driven approaches to linking science to society for improved public and environmental health.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Project support under USPHS Grant ES10337 is gratefully acknowledged.
Figure 3. StarTree is used to navigate GIS layers and browse layer metadata
Figure 4. Example of spatial analysis functionality available within the portal