By RHONDA HAAG,
Monroe County,
Chief Resilience Officer
After three years of regional coordination efforts among Monroe County staff and representatives of all five municipalities in the Keys, mobile LiDAR road survey work has begun on the 200 miles of roads in Islamorada, Layton, Marathon, Key Colony Beach, and Key West.
The $554,000 effort is being led by Monroe County in an effort to assist the municipalities who are fully funding the project.
The work is similar to the county’s road adaptation planning efforts just completed by the county. Wood Environmental and Infrastructure Solutions, Inc. is conducting the professional mobile LiDAR elevation, surveying and mapping services for roads and facilities to assist in the resilience planning work.
The mobile LiDAR work measures accuracy of the roadways’ existing heights to within a half inch, unlike aerial LiDAR which can contain errors up to several inches for such an application.
Vehicles with sophisticated LiDAR survey equipment are traveling up and down every mile of roadway, electronically surveying and also gauging first floor elevations of municipal-owned facilities.
Next steps are to take the LiDAR survey information and conduct a municipal-wide road adaptation planning effort to provide the cost estimates, conceptual designs, and roads adaptation implementation plan, and schedule for each municipality accordingly.
When complete, county and city officials will have a single plan to provide long-term resilience for county and municipal roads.
They will be able to work in unison to seek and develop sources of funding for implementation of the plan.
These regional efforts seek to provide a true regional resilience plan for the Florida Keys.●
The plan
Once the mobile LiDAR road survey work is complete, Monroe County and city officials from Islamorada, Layton, Marathon, Key Colony Beach, and Key West will have a single plan to provide long-term resilience for county and municipal roads
