I love infrastructure engineering. There's so much going on that allows us to take things for granted. Even the 2021 Texas power grid failure fared relatively well for how close it skirted absolute disaster.
A new line was put in in 2018 for $130mm. "The new transmission line is an addition to the original line which began commercial service in 1974 and had been experiencing reliability issues. The original line will be used a backup, should it be needed."
Looks like OSM doesn't have a ton of data on US pipelines or water lines. It's understandable. I do wonder if tools like this would encourage more mapping of these.
Alot of that info is probably already publicly available as GIS datasets. Many counties and cities have surprisingly good web interfaces to such information or at least will let you download it. Most people probably use it to look up land parcel information, but they usually include many more layers such hydrants, water and sewer, sometimes detailed local electrical grid info depending how local utilities operate.
Someone should make a crawler that specifically looks for GIS data on government pages and auto-adds it if passes sanity checks and is up-to-date.
Let me be the one to say: Open Street Map has had some difficult experiences with automated edits, and has developed a process to prevent such problems.
certainly US legal questions apply, but what about other criteria? avoiding simplistic responses.. nations have responded differently to mapping and open maps. A recent UNGGIM report showed that close to fifteen (edit not thirty) percent of nations politically recognized worldwide, do not publish national maps themselves in any meaningful way. Next consider the case of the UK Commonwealth Nations, who generally considered maps and mapping to be Crown authorized only, until a certain date not long ago. Opposite to that is the nation of China, which I think forbids all mapping of anything at all, to be done or publicly published, without a license from the single political party government. Other interesting cases abound, in fact, most nations have unique stories and solutions.
I suggest we avoid simplistic responses or carefully worded trap questions from a Defense point of view only, and really engage in a civil manner, about a topic that does have Defense elements, but also real civilian elements, too.
Maps in Commonwealth countries made by their geophysical departments tend to have Crown copyright rather than Crown authorization. Unlike US government products which are by definition and law, not considered subject to copyright (ie are in the public domain).
The RAND report "Mapping the Risks" (2004) [1] finds that only 6% of sampled US federal GIS datasets were useful to an adversary wanting to attack US infrastructure. The datasets sampled were quite varied and included the obvious power, natural gas, etc infrastructure but also included less obvious datasets such as the location of hazardous chemicals. The report found that none of the GIS information provided to the public they sampled would be useful for adversaries, primarily because the information was readily available via other means that an adversary would prefer to use instead (e.g. [2] for how this was done in the cold war prior to satellite imagery becoming commonplace). The report also characterises the main barrier to a terrorist attack on infrastructure not being a lack of knowing where to attack, but rather, having the means to perform an attack that would have any significant effect. Knocking out a few power pylons here or there would be more of an inconvenience that could be quickly recovered from. By comparison, destroying the only factory in the world with machinery capable of producing a critical consumable component needed for power stations would be a more valuable target if it would take 5 years to recover supply of the component.
From a military point of view, the scorched earth tactic[3] of destroying infrastructure to disrupt an enemy force is out of favour because it also denies the victor from quickly rebuilding and stabilising a country[4]. Instead of blowing up power stations that could take a decade to rebuild, modern military forces would rather destroy a substation on a military base, such that the military base is rendered temporarily less useful. Due to the minor effect caused, within 12 months, the substation could be rebuilt and the the base repurposed for a new military force established by the victor. Invading military forces are not going to have difficulty identifying critical infrastructure used for military purposes which they should target, particularly because of the prevalence of satellite imagery.
Impressive data collection from OpenStreetMap (as always :)).
It would be great when wind power sources could be highlighted like solar sources and when wind & solar are more visible by default. Even solar power parks appear only on larger zoom scale (in my area).
OSM contains errors and I don't know how to fix them.
For example, it shows a 115kv line that branches off into Palo Alto and back out through Mountain Veiw before rejoining the main line along Steven's Creek.
This line is NOT continuous and in fact only the part north from the Palo Alto substation is active. That's the section that was hit by the small plane carrying Tesla execs a number of years back. That incident knocked the entire city offline because the other part of the line I'm talking about is NOT hooked up.
> OSM contains errors and I don't know how to fix them.
The easy part of the answer to this is: go to openstreetmap.org, sign up for an account, login (top right) and then press the "Edit" button (top left). There is a lot of info[0] on their wiki on how to get started.
There is also information on how to map power lines[1] - I am guessing applying it to your specific example is what might be a bit harder, but it's probably doable.
The overpass-api tool is useful for finding objects, for example the power lines in the area that you mentioned: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1f6N
It's sometimes a bit fiddly, but when I very occasionally (like once a year) find something to correct, I can get it done.
I'm happy to help, I've done a decent amount of power line mapping in California. If you reply here or @willbradley on Twitter I can either advise or work with you to identify the problems. Should take 15 mins to fix once we know what exactly the changes need to be.
I noticed that the nearest power plant nearby isn’t here. It’s really small, so I’m not surprised but I’m not sure how to flag the discrepancy and share details about the station.
If you leave a note anonymously on http://osm.org and then link it here in a reply. I would be happy to add it for you, link to the wikipedia/wikidata page for the power station if there is one. There is a lot that can be tagged if you look at the documentation try to include as much information as possible.
Go to openstreetmap.org, sign up for an account, login (top right) and then press the "Edit" button.
There will be offer of tutorial, I recommend going though it.
This in editing: select that you want to add point/area, create it and search for power plant in top left. Select it, add more detail if able and save the edit (save button in top right, then enter description of edit in sidebar on the left and press save button).
Edits go live immediately, but data consumers update with some delay depending on their setup (ranges from up to 60 second delay for ones using minutely updates to "no updates").
Anybody know how much trouble you’d get in cross country skiing or snowshoeing along the routes of these big power lines? They clear all the trees and brush and it looks like it would be a great alternative route to get around in winter. All those no trespassing signs have me spooked.
There are various degrees of clear. You might be surprised by how much scrub can grow there between clearances. Also the grade of the land can change quite abruptly. It's not like a railroad right of way where the grade is very limited. There can be significant ravines between pylons. The powerlines don't care because they're up above it all anyway. Pipelines likely have better paths but I suspect those are monitored more closely than power lines.
From what I've observed as a hiker, brush clearance can be touch and go. In some regions it doesn't take many years of neglect to turn a clearing into an impassable thicket. Also, a power line can go practically up the side of a mountain, cross streams and ravines, etc.
I used to work in those circles ~15 years ago and the short answer was: Yes.
It turns out that an absurd amount of sensitive/national security information is actually public but it becomes sensitive once it's organized in a way that it becomes "actionable" for attack, compromise, etc. In my particular situation, an acquaintance studying operations+logistics had overlaid communications trunks with transportation hubs and realized many of them were one in the same.
Now that more of this information is available easily and in readily combinable forms should make us re-evaluate all of it and how much gets shared, with who, when, and to what detail.
Btw, this is also a reason you should be skeptical whenever there's a leak and someone claims "none of this data is classified!" While technically true, a piece of non-classified but relatively unknown information might be the missing piece that makes something actionable.
Not necessarily, there's a huge drive at the moment (in the UK at least) encouraging utility companies to make their asset related data open and publicly available. Look up the Energy Networks Association's Open Networks initiative, quite interesting. The same approach is being taken by other European countries.
It is pointless to 'hide' the things which are accessible to anyone, including people who isn't even there physically, eg can look through Google Earth or just browse photos with geo-tags.
Back in the day it could be (and sometimes was) a secret or protected information.
That's somehow naive statement. There is a difference between getting full information just with one query and building complicated fail-prune system for weeks/months to analyze data.
That's somehow naive statement. There is a difference between being visited by the guys in the suits because you were seen with a photo camera near powerlines and not.
You basically said is equivalent to statement that computer software is just a bunch of ones and zeros and everyone has access to ones and zeros for free. But at some point it stops being just chain of ones and zeros and becomes meaningful computer program. It's similar problem like with forbidden numbers - at some point how things are arranged overcomes the value of elements itself, but the line there is blurry. So yeah, the "naive statement" is still on your side.
You may conjure any statements you can, but something can be only hidden if there is a way to keep it hidden. Before the IT and the consumer technology revolution that would have been required physically visiting the locations and making photos (and before ~2000 - making them on a film) of the infrastructure elements.
Now you can obtain pretty recent (no more than 6-8 years old for the most part, usually much newer) photos of almost anything in the world (bar Germany, China and some "not interesting" for the great powers countries) just from your chair, wherever it can be.
So yes, some aspects of that information is still classified or restricted, but that's... Polichinelle secret. Everybody (who cares, of course) knows what is there, yet the suits can harass and even jail you if you somehow trespass the invisible blurry line between their negligence and their obedience to the procedure.
In August and September 2007, I spend some tracking all major power lines in the Netherlands using Google Earth. Interesting to see that the information provided on openinframap.org is much more detailed.
Definitely see some transmission lines missing (e.g. the line going through the Fish Lake Valley in Nevada), but I guess it's a WIP. I'll probably figure out how to contribute...
Would be difficult but interesting if they included proposed projects. There are 36 square km of solar farms planned in west central ohio that don't show here at all.
https://openinframap.org/#10.58/33.9452/-118.3529
I love infrastructure engineering. There's so much going on that allows us to take things for granted. Even the 2021 Texas power grid failure fared relatively well for how close it skirted absolute disaster.
[1] https://practical.engineering/blog/2021/9/16/repairing-under... (I should give Grady more money) People here may remember jwz's post on the topic in 2002, copying the emails from 1989 (note the following link may display something unsavory with the HN referrer, in which case copy-and-paste it): https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/