Day 2: June 4, 2013

We started the morning working with Jesus. He continued with the GIS tutorial and today he managed to share his input files so that we could easily follow the same ArcMap steps in our own laptops. Then he gave each of us several routes to work on. At the begining the work was going pretty slow as I was still getting used to most of the commands and GIS tools. At 12:00 we had a meeting with the rest of students and professors from RailTEC. Xiang, who is defending his texis this coming Friday, presented  a ppt about the relation between the frequency of rail inspection and the risk of derailment (risk of hazardous material leakage). Among other very good points, it was commented that a cost effective analysis must be undertaken as even if the rail line is inspected daily there will always be a risk (best case it would be very small) associated with transportation. Also it is important to consider the effect of weather (cold/warm) in all of this analysis.

For the rest of the dayI worked in the quantitative risk analysis of the first route that I was assigned. Using ArcMap I determined for each segment of the route the population that would be affected in case of a leakage event assuming a 0.5 mile radius of impact. The following figure (FIG2) shows the final result where the route is coloured according to the amount of people affected (green being the lowest and red the highest).

FIG2: Amount of people living within a 0.5 mile radius from the rail line.

Today:
-Jesus and Xiang GIS tutorial II   (Done)
-Go over the tutorial II             (Done)
-Remind some other useful GIS tools: Merge, Buffer, Intersect            (Done)
-Understand all the steps of their qualitative risk analysis                   (Done)
*-Weekly RailTEC meeting                                                               (Done)

Tomorrow:
-Work on the other 5 routes
-Keep working to improve skills with ArcMap