Thursday, July 12, 2012

You Are Being Watched

My plotting out the route of the Press Expedition through the Olympic Mountains reminded me of an article from Peirce County. I recently traversed to the wilds of rural Pierce County east of Tacoma and Fort Lewis. This part of our landscape is a mix of small towns, suburban cities and rather heavily developed rural areas. Pierce County has begun a program using aerial photographs to identify unpermitted buildings HERE. This sort of program should bring out some interesting philosophy and political alignments. The program has identified at least 17 unpermitted homes, and they haven't even begun looking at east county area.

Frequent high resolution aerial photographs are now a common tool for planners. If I can spot fractures in a logging road using aerial photographs (deep-seated-landslide-in-upper-trout-creek), spotting unpermitted buildings using a GIS overlay should be pretty easy.

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