So, I wonder if you can just keep an eye on that I'll keep it I'll try to keep an eye on it to Jennifer. And I just am asking Yvonne if they can make it. Before we get started. Right, let me see if I can find Dr. Shabazz here. He's here. He is. Oh, okay. I'm promoting him now. Perfect. All right. Good. Hi, Dr. Shabazz. Hello, I may be rejoining by my computer looks like we might have worked the work the kinks out. Great. Okay. Excellent. So let's go ahead and get started then recording is going. Welcome everyone to the April 4th meeting of the African Heritage Reparation Assembly. Pursuant to pursuant to chapter 20 of the acts of 2021. This meeting will be conducted via remote means members of the public who wish to access the meeting may do so via zoom or by telephone. No in-person attendance of members of the public will be permitted. But every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via technological means. So, before we recognize some folks that are here with us, I'd like to just go through and make sure that everybody can be heard and can hear us and Thank you. You get me on that one every week. I think I think I got it right last week. So let's start with you, Dr. Rhodes. I'm here. Excellent. Hala. Yes, thank you. Excellent. Ivan. I'm here. Thank you. Yep. And Alexis. Here. Dr. Shabazz. Right now we can't hear you, Dr. Shabazz, but I know you're having some technical difficulties. So we'll, we'll check back in with you. And Paul. I'm here. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you. And that's what I want to start with is welcoming you, Paul. Thank you for being here. I would like to recognize a couple other folks as well that are here with us. We have our new Crest director, Earl Miller is here with us. And we also have Jennifer, could you just say quickly what Abdallah Galini does. If they are also here with us. Yes, he's our implementation project manager for the Crest program for the Crest program. Excellent. And then we have our council president Lynn Greismar here. And let's just quickly. So thank you for, for joining us. Just wanted to recognize those folks. And since we are moving pretty quickly here, we have designated an hour for this meeting and we do have another item to cover. Right into our first item here, which is a presentation. We're very excited about this. This is a presentation coming from Kerry Spitzer and Susan straight of the Donahue Institute, and they will be presenting the results of the black African American census that we've contracted with them for. So I'm going to bring both of them into the room. I do see Kerry but I'm not seeing Susan, but let's bring Kerry in and then we'll ask. There she is. Hi Kerry. Good afternoon. Nice to see everyone. So Susan was intending to join us so I, but she may have gotten stuck cut up in some other work so if it's possible for somebody to keep an eye out if she does have the ability to join us. Absolutely, I will keep my eye out and I do not see her right now but I will promote her if I do see her. Okay, I'll send her message to. Okay, great. Thank you, Kerry. I want to recognize that Kerry is a former school board committee member and resident of Amherst and now working at the Donahue Institute. And we've been working closely with her and her team. And so I'm going to just go ahead and hand it over to you unless would you like to wait a minute to see if Susan can join us. No, I think we should go ahead. Right. I think you need sharing screen. Do you can you do you see the ability to share screen. I believe I do so I'm going to, I think I'll just start off with some introductory remarks I did not prepare a PowerPoint or anything but I do have the maps available to share with everybody so I was going to focus more on how to use the tools that we created so I'll just step back a moment introduced myself. My name is Dr. Kerry Spitzer I'm a research manager at the Donahue Institute. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Donahue Institute we do a lot of different things but I'm in the economic and public policy research group, and within that group, Susan Street is senior program manager for the population estimates for the state data center for census data from Massachusetts. So we were approached. Actually, I think a little bit before actually joined the Donahue Institute by this group to help share the 2020 census data, because we know that you're interested in better understanding where the black and African American population in Amherst lives, and also how that intersects with the student population and oh Susan had a confusion about the time start so hold on. She should be jumping in right now and it was probably my fault in telling her it was a long time. I'll get her thanks. Alright, so she said she's going to jump on now. So sorry for getting off track. And so today what I'll be sharing with you is the result of that project so we are using two data sources one is the 2020 PL 94 census data. And the other source is the American Community Survey data which also comes from the Census Bureau, but unlike the, the decennial census data it's survey based so it's a five year survey based estimate for the population. So I just want to kind of start off with some basic data about Amherst and then I'll be sharing with you the kind of more smaller lever geography, geographic analysis that we did. As everybody here probably is aware, Amherst has a population of about 39,000 individuals as of 2020 and about 23,000 of those residents are students either in college or graduate school. And according to the 2020 census data 16,000 of those residents lived in college storms, which by the census they've often refer to those as also as group quarters. Now, for all residents in Amherst overall black or African American population, either alone, meaning that when, you know, when you're asked on the census to check a box for your race either checked off black or African American alone, or in combination with any other race. So for the purposes of this project, we were looking at the population of the residents. And identified solely as black or African American or in combination with any other race so for all of the cases where I'm referring to the black or African American population that's the population I'm talking about so it could be in combination with other races. And so in Amherst there 3450 residents or about 9% of all residents, including students who identified as black or African American. So of those, we estimate that about 1500 live in blocks that are at least 90% or more college dormitories and obviously there are many more who are living off campus in student housing, or in rental housing. So what I'm going to do now is start by sharing the the tableau maps that we shared. And I was in conversation with Michelle that these can live on the African heritage reparation assemblies website, and also they will be hosted on the Institute's public tableau website. Alright, and I also share these by email with the folks whose emails I had so hopefully they can be circulated as well. So people can look at at home at a later date. So what you're looking at here this is the finest geographic level. This is block level data. So we have two maps here on the left. And please interrupt me if anybody has a question or make this a little bit bigger by any chance. That's what I was just wondering. I can definitely zoom in as we go like to specific levels and, but I'm not sure I have the ability to make it. Okay, that's looking for my zoom. So you made this full screen on your browser with that it is a full screen. It is okay. Yeah, that's okay yeah if you can just zoom as you go that would be great. So on the left. And first off to start this is all the census 2020 descent decennial census data so I'm just keep in mind this is two year old data but so what you're seeing here is at the block group you can see very clearly for anybody who's familiar with time these dark areas this is the Hampshire college campus. The Amherst college campus and then you can see UMass over here. As you zoom in you can select any one block, you can see the total the count of the population in college housing and the total population so for example, over here you can see that over 90 or 98% of the population is located in college storm you can see the tracked number and the block. And the nice thing is if you click on one of these it'll then bring up on the other side, the, the share black or African American alone or in combination with another race so you can see in this block here. Individuals were counted as being black or African American alone for in combination with another race out of the total population of 391. So the share is 7.2%. And as you can see, you know you can see the map layer underneath with details about where this is in town. Like on the home button, it should be bringing you back to the full map but sometimes I find actually need to refresh to get the full map. But as you can see on the college campuses are often darker shaded areas so if you look at Hampshire college right here, you can see that it is 14.7% of the populations living in dorms on Hampshire college is African American or black. I will know so one of the things to be wary of if you were like me and you decide to zoom in on your senses block and look at the population in that area, you're going to see numbers that potentially aren't what you expected and this is because the senses uses something called differential privacy to protect the identities of individuals and so they introduce noise to these estimates to allow for to prevent people from being able to zoom in on the, for example, the one African American family they know on their block and be able to connect that to other data potentially about their household status or their income that the census also collects. So this differential privacy may result in counts that are not what you necessarily would anticipate so I'd really encourage anybody using these maps to look at the patterns they see in the data, rather than to focus in on the exact counts that you're going to see in the data. The other thing I caution is that since Amherst, you know, is not the most densely populated town, you will notice for example up in this corner with the total population of 10 individuals and six identifying as black or African American alone. 60% of the population categorized as black or African American alone, or in combination with another race. I would just caution that at these extremely low population counts these numbers aren't that reliable so I would look at the patterns overall in town, and that should be more informative. I've also sent the team, all of this data in tabular format so all of the underlying data is also has also been delivered to the town, but I think one of the things I'd focus on here is that the population is fairly dispersed over town so I'm not seeing any areas that are particularly given what we know about segregation in the United States I'd say that this is not an extremely segregated map in terms of you're seeing the patterns over town. I would say that we are seeing a concentration of the black and African American population on the college campuses, but then some of these other areas where it's particularly dark from very low population counts so I would say again because of this differential privacy issue that I wouldn't necessarily have much weight in that though there are clearly areas in town with a higher share of the population, and it also said that there are places here that are represented it's having zero population as black or African American and it's very likely that there are actually folks who identify as black or African American living in these areas because of that differential privacy issue. So, this is the finest grain level of data and at this level. A lot of the other measures that people are interested aren't available so we also did block group level maps and combined this census 2020 data with data from the American Community Survey which is also put out by the Census Bureau but is survey data so there is, there is. As you find with any survey there are margins of error. And these maps represent what we the analysis we did at that level so the indicators that we were asked to look at how to do with again because there was a focus on trying to understand how the black and African American population over slapped with the student population one of the measures we looked at was the share of the population enrolled in college and that's on the extreme left. There's also an interest in looking at constant, excuse me concentrations of poverty so we use 200% of the federal poverty line as our measure. We also looked at the median household income in, and this is in $20 21. And finally, again, all the way on the right we have the share block or African American alone or in combination with another race. So here this is a larger geographic area so we have more people, but I would, again, make the same statement that this is survey data so there is some error. So I went it again I would not focus solely on the counts or the percents but more about the patterns across town. That's what I would really focus on. So again, you're going to see the college campuses really easy to point out we've got Hampshire, UMass and Amherst College and one thing I'll point out for that people living in group quarters. The census doesn't calculate a poverty rate for those individuals and doesn't collect their income data so that's why over here you don't see a poverty rate for the college campuses and you also won't see the median household income calculated for those areas. But one of the things the part of the reason we wanted to bring this data into is that one of the things that happens in Amherst is because we have so many students who are living off campus for whom the poverty rate is calculated. It can often make the town look like it has a higher than anticipated level of poverty and this is true in other college towns as well as something that's been well documented that college towns often appear to have much higher levels of poverty than comparable places. So again, I think you're going to see when you when you're looking at these maps again the higher concentrations of residents represent identifying as black or African American on the college campuses. But then again you can see here other parts of town. So if you just wanted to zoom in. Michelle and I were looking at these earlier so this here right above Hampshire College, which includes, let's say Long Meadow Drive, Glendale, you know this, you can look here and see the share is 14.6% so that's higher than the town average of 9%. And you can also look at slightly higher poverty. And a fairly low share of the population enrolled in college only 3.2%. So, depending on what your group schools were you might say like this looks like a neighborhood where we may want to do some extended community engagement, reach out to folks living on these streets and you were going to target the African American population who's not non student population living in the area this might be a good way of kind of identifying a neighborhood that you don't want to focus in on. Does anybody have any questions I'm happy to. I think the big thing I wanted to point out again is just that with these maps and as with using this and stand in general, you know it's, it's the best data we have but it's not perfect so I see questions I will let you call on folks though I know and. It doesn't matter but yes I saw first Dr Shabazz and then I saw Hala, and then I saw Dr Rhodes. So, let's go in that order. Thank you very much. This is one of these accounts since it's causing problems but I am looking at roughly speaking in the day in data from the from the three institutions of higher ed that has as roughly about 1000 students who identifies black African American. If Hampshire College has roughly 75, let us say that identify as of African heritage black African American and Amherst College and say 180 something 180 that identify that way. That's roughly about 1300. Now, for sure, not all of that 1300 lives in Amherst reside in Amherst, but that's a sizable number. At the same time the census data is telling us that the African American population of Amherst is about 2000, a little over 2000 people. So, I'm really trying to get at it. Anything from what you have so far helps us to understand how much of the 2000 or so listed in the census are year round residents are actually reside year round in the town of Amherst, and how many are students because right now by my look at it, more than 50%. Close to well over 50% of the number could be students who are not long term do not necessarily would not count as long time, long time, long term Amherst residents. Is there, is there any takeaway from what you've looked that can help us distinguish it on that account those that are residents, part of Amherst vote here are taxed here, and those that are not that live here more or less nine months and do not but do not consider this where they reside. And I think the one one point of clarification, because I think that's a really good question but I wanted to make sure because I my numbers are going to be a little bit higher than yours when I talk about the black or African American population and that's just because the, the numbers I'm using here are those who either checked off only the box black or African American on the census or in combination with any other races so if I checked white and black or African American population alone. I would have, I would have included those folks here so I have an estimate of 3450 residents in Amherst to identify as black or African American alone or in combination so, but then when I also look at so what I did. And then as we looked at the data on residents who lived in group quarters because I think that's the easiest way to kind of pull out those students who are living in dormitories, who are clearly, you know, not considering this their permanent residents they dormitories have been over the summer so there's no way that they're spending the summer here. And so roughly 1500 of those 3450 residents are living on dorm, in dormitories either at Amherst College Hampshire or or UMass so I think you're totally right that we need to, you know, it is a little share of the population that we're talking about who are students. Now I think beyond that I'm not and I look to Susan if she has anything to add here but I don't think there's much we can say about whether or not the folks are, you know, from the census data I don't think there's much we can say about their intentions You can look at who's enrolled in college or graduate school, and again it's about half it's it's we get at that same kind of ratio so I think you're right that about half of the residents, counted by the census are students and their connection to Amherst is, you know, I can't really comment in any more on that other than to kind of call out those who are living in dormitories and I think are clearly not year round residents. So do you want to add anything to that before we move to Dr. Rhodes or to Halana. No, well, maybe only that. The different sources never quite fully match up which is very frustrating for people trying to calculate it all out and trying to get very specific. The closest you can get from the census side is using that American community survey data. And what I would typically do is kind of look at the college student age groups and say you know what percent of these are enrolled in college or graduate school. You will have some overlap I mean there might be kids who grew up in Amherst who are also enrolled in college or graduate school in the community. To add to that additional confusion. Some college students don't fill out their form in the proper place they might fill it out at their parents home, which could be somewhere in eastern mass, even though technically they're living in Amherst most of the time so they're, they're all these kind of like slivers of overlap and confusion but I do think it is worthwhile to kind of do that second check as you have and kind of say now what are the administrative data sources tell us and just kind of look at them all lined up together and say like, is this giving me a reasonable picture I think that's very smart. Since you have that data. Thank you Susan and Hala. Yes, I'm not sure if this is a Donahue question, but I know from my. I lived experience that on the there's under reporting for the census that we use and then NBR also came out with a report. So, with the patterns. Dr. Spitzer you keep talking about would that help us to find the families that did not collect official census. Do you think. Yeah, and so I think the census has, has reported that they do under count black or African American populations along with, you know, other other demographic groups and over count other groups and so it's it's it is a it is a concern with the data. I mean, if you assume that the people because I think a lot of the undercount comes from folks. Some being unwilling to report to fill out the census but other reasons you know just people who may be more likely to be renters and therefore moving around or unless likely to be counted but Susan again is expert on this, but I guess what I'd be saying like from a perspective I guess if you assume that that on the likelihood of not filling out the census is evenly distributed across the population of African American or black residents and I do think this would kind of guide you on where to go now if it were concentrated in certain geographic areas then and then it wouldn't necessarily be a good use and I don't know if we have data to say whether or not to say which one of those scenarios is more likely to be the case.  So some of the data sources that you might look to would include. If you have school enrollment data by race and ethnicity to do kind of like a comparison. If you have specific program enrollment data that you can look at. We've already heard about administrative data from colleges and universities, because, because certainly there is an undercount among that group. But then if you compare that against, you know, the census count is also used as a control total for the ACS. So you won't get any further comparing the ACS to the census data. But it, again, just if you if you have better local knowledge to use then that that would be recommended. It's just sometimes getting your hands on on those local administrative data records because as they should be these are also confidential and protected. Thank you. Susan and Kerry, I really, really appreciate this information. It's extraordinarily helpful for my end. And even when I look at the data and I said, well, if I use an error rate of 10, 15% is still extraordinary in relationship to the number of students. So that brings it back to you a question because I missed it, Kerry, when you were going through it in terms of the town as a total. How many residents are there and out of that number of residents, how many of those are students. Sure. So, um, the decennial census count for the census was 39,000 to a 263 residents in 2020. And the, I'm getting the American Community Survey for the number of students because that's the source we have so again these aren't totally apples and apples but that was about 23,000 college and graduate students in the town of Amherst. So over half. Yeah, that's an extraordinary number. By any means, and I think that most people in Amherst would find that shocking. But it is something that we really need to be aware of now. I think that, you know, given I've been in Amherst a long time that when there, there was a time where for economic reasons. Amherst wanted to count those students in and in terms of our total population for state and federal reasons. And those reasons still remain very viable in terms of why that occurred, but it's still something that is interesting for all of us. To be cognizant of is the tremendous amount of impact that the students have here in this town. And obviously, with that comes the impact, the positive and negative and also in terms of the contributions that they make to this town. We are student town. I do want to give Paul the opportunity to ask any questions he might have, but also checking in with Yvonne and Alexis. Do either of you have any questions. At this moment, the, you know, maybe still processing. Okay. So Paul, did you have any specific questions while Kerry and Susan are here. No, I think, I think Earth Plan is really important that the census numbers are important to the town in different ways, but that we need to understand who we are in terms of who we are as a town. We don't discount students because they are important part of our community. And so I think it's always important to recognize that. And also, I just really, you know, it'll be helpful when to see the numbers on the paper and to see the maps a little bit closer. I think that will that's important for me to really grapple with what you're coming up with. So thank you for this. Ivan. Yeah, I wanted to say that the data is thank you so much for sharing the data. It's, you know, it's, I opening actually I was ready writing some of the numbers and stuff down but you know my personal experience is that a lot of black and African American students come and they stay. And so they're enrolled, and their kids go like my like, which is what happened to me I moved here my, you know, I got married my kids went to school I ended up being a resident even though I would be enrolled I would have come up as enrolled. I'm at the time at Hampshire College so and I think that there's a difficult way. There is no real way to get at that, unless you're doing a special survey, and you know kind of gleaning information in that way that Susan talked about which was a local local knowledge. And some of that is just happenstance knowledge, you know, like, like, which would I mean if we did it as a committee if we did that kind of serving as a committee then it would be about figuring out a way to read that data and have it be clear enough, you know, concise enough, you know, like we're actually getting at some, but then again would it be worth it like how many how many people could we you know how how what a what a big impact would it make on the data that we already have. You know, so I think those are the kinds of questions that we need to ask is it, you know, would we be able to glean any significant impactful new information by doing anything that would be local. Yeah, and I think at our next meeting we'll have the opportunity to talk about what we want to do with this data and maybe put a list of questions together that we might have for Carrie and Susan. Before I go to you or I just want to recognize that a member of BAM, which is the Black Assembly of Amherst, Massachusetts Kathleen Anderson has joined us. And I also want to recognize that BAM is initially sort of the body that developed this idea of doing the black census for the town so I just wanted to acknowledge that. Err, please go ahead. Some things I really, it really would be helpful to have a summary of these findings, along with the added commentary in terms of the issues that could be attributed to the data so that people could look at. In other words, the limitations of the data but put put in summary form. We all can go through and summarize it and do it ourselves. But I think that when we put it out to this town, to the larger population, we really need to have a summary of it. So everyone can see it at a glance and then put down the limitations of that data. Secondly, I was struck by the fact that Carrie, when you were presenting some of the information, the neighborhood in which I live, Long Meadow Drive. And that whole area up there. That the numbers of African American that live there and that is largely single family homes in that area, except for a couple of apartment complexes, which was very interesting because that's something that because I walked in it was and I lived there so long. I've seen these changes over the years. And if anyone came in our neighborhood and walked it, you would be able to see that because we have a number of African Americans who live in that area who are single family homeowners. And it's something that I think was nothing that I was surprised at, but I think that a lot of other people would be surprised at that number. Thank you. Dr. Shabazz. So I'm on the data you institutes tableau for Massachusetts municipal summaries for Amherst and just wanted to come back to the way you got at this 3400 three over 3400 numbers so that's adding what you list as black alone with two or more races where one of those checked in that category of two or more race was was black or African American, and as well as some other race. No that was that's alone. So basically it's from the black alone, and the two or more races alone where black was one of the two or more. Is that where you came at you got to a 3400 number. That would be so if you're looking at the Donahue municipal summaries. Yes, and those are the, the races alone as as versus the races alone or in combination that they're because race alone, as I see it is 2382 is that correct. Black alone count. If you're viewing it on the website yeah that it would be right I don't have that number in front of me right now but whatever's on the Donahue state data center. Yes, summer. And so what we did. Sorry. And then, and then you're correct so then if you. So the person filled out their census form, and some people only checked off one block, you know whether. Sorry one check box whether it was black or Asian or white. Maybe they checked off more than one box. Maybe they checked off black and Asian and white. And so those get counted in the black alone or in combination. And then in the dashboard that you're looking at. Yes those those should have fallen into as, as you're deducing those should have fallen into the two or more race. So where it's where it's, it's, I'm looking at so at 2382 black alone to get from there to 3400 seems is telling me that the two or more racist count of 3636 that the black that that those that have black in that two or more racist count is a pretty substantial part of the 3636 in fact, at least half more than half of the 3636 to get us at 3400 from from well close to close to 50% maybe not. But but but a good chunk of that two or more races must actually have checked black as one of the, one of the races. Let's talk about right. I should probably review the way that the census Bureau did their race coding in 2020 again because that they've changed it from 2010, like in ways that might not be very intuitive, and a lot more people ended up in the some other race category as a result of it this time but but logically, the way you're describing it makes sense and, and the other thing to remember is that those are race alone or in combination groups for any particular block, they're going to add up to more than 100% of the people in that block. You might have, you know, 30% black alone or in combination. Plus another 50% Asian alone or in combination, plus another, you know 60% white alone or in combination and you know you'll look at that and be like hey that's more than all the people but because of all that the crossover in the self reporting. One other thing in terms of the, in an earlier discussion about the possibilities of this there was this idea that we could see by different districts or groups I don't know the exact term but within the map. We could begin to see where there might be different populations. So again, we may not see anything like Evanston in terms of its African American population being heavily concentrated in one particular district, but by virtue of the different areas that the Amherst, I like to think of it as a rectangle but the little Amherst rectangle. You mentioned that we might could see in different areas was it is there anything there where for this 2,400 black alone or 3,400 black plus others that we can, we can see some areas that are that are more heavily populated to know where we could direct postcards mailings or something like that. I think so. So, first off, you'll see the college campuses are clearly areas of concentration of the black or African American population. I think what, and I was highlighting, you know, that neighborhood in South Amherst on off of West Street as another area where the population is higher now where the only place I'd give caution is if you're looking at a block that has a very low population I just think I'd be cautious there but in some of these other blocks so I could share my screen again and I want to be conscious of the time to but And Carrie I recall you saying that you might have to leave what time did you have to leave by I probably should leave a few minutes before for just to pick up my son from school but so I love would be good but But so if you look here. I guess this is where Dr votes, he was saying, oh, it refreshed on me. And, but you can select here for example this block 4003 off of West Street has a 88 people counted as living here who are black or African American out of a population of 428 so share 20% and that's about the town average and might be worth conducting outreach in that area. And I would know, you know direct caution if you were going to go up here to this area that has a total population of 10 I wouldn't necessarily say that you should send out folks there. But I think if you go if you go across the town and you look at areas where the population is a little bit higher and you're seeing these dark so the darker shading indicates a higher share of the population. So hopefully that'll be useful. And final thing I'm just looking at one thing. Another part of your summary, where you talk about percentage point change and population share by race and ethnicity. Do I understand it that the. So, white. Not alone non Hispanic. We're seeing a percentage decrease in the overall population, but with African Americans were also seeing, or can you talk about increasing or decreasing from 2010 to 2020. Are you looking right now at the at the Donahue's website. Yes. Okay, so those estimates I think Susan's group put together. So maybe I'll let her to speak to those. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, and I actually just want to catch up to where you are. Do you mind if I share my screen so everyone can see what what you're seeing. Here. Okay, so are you on the few different things going on here on the municipal summaries. Yes, but the bar branch. Okay, so if anyone hasn't seen this is a great. Thank you for this segue to let me showcase this. We have put together summaries looking at population over time. Here's Amherst total population, population by race group. And when we say percent point change. So let me just see page two comparisons is probably where you are. There we go. Great. Okay. So, um, percent change in population share by race and ethnicity. So, um, not that the black alone non Hispanic population increased by 0.9%, but that it went from, let's see where it was before. Talking about its share. Talking about the share that went out so the share is here. 6.1% of the population in 2020. So what that other graph that Dr. Shabazz was pointing to that 0.9% increase in share, that means that it went up to 6.1 from whatever I guess 5.2% in 2020. And then, if you wanted to kind of dig a little bit deeper, you can look at it in a table format to get back to 2000. Here is the, the count. Count in the senses black alone on Hispanic. And do we have the shares here. Maybe not we also have a map like a statewide map that you can look at where you can look at Amherst on the map and that's one of the, I can get back to that. Here's one I had it pulled up so here you can look at the, look at different years. From 2010 to 2020. Kind of you can look at it statewide. These are these are the race alone groups. So you can look at it here. And I mean one thing that kind of jumps out about Amherst if we choose. Like what just to kind of do the reverse out. You know, where the darker blue is white alone population you can see that Amherst is, you know, one of the more diverse towns in the region, just by looking at this. And while I'm here, do you mind. Carrie talked a little bit about differential privacy, and how you can't. You know, if Dr Rhodes knows how many neighbors live in his block and wants to count them and then look at the census and say they got it wrong. You know just to remember that it's scrambled. And we put a dashboard up to hopefully make it a little bit easier for people to get a sense of, like when you say it scrambled like how scrambled. And we have comparisons by race and ethnicity because for large population groups maybe it's not scrambled as much as a percentage as some of the smaller groups. So looking at total age. If we wanted to look at block, which is what the maps are based on. And here's the the mean absolute error. So the difference between the scrambled count and the actual count using census 2010 data which is the only demonstration data that the Census Bureau will release to us. You can see that you could be two minus 19 people in a block. That's the total the range, and that the average range that you're going to be off by is 2.6 people. But there could be if you see a block of 19. You know, individuals reported a lack alone. So if that could be, that could be differential privacy kind of interfering with this, which is why I think to Kerry's point, you know, if you can move up to kind of a higher level. And now I wish we had put block group here we didn't, but we do have tracks. You can look at that too. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for looking at our dashboard I appreciate that somebody into it. And Dr Rhodes just just I'm going to pause for a second to say Kerry if you need to leave please feel free and we'll follow up with any questions. Also, follow up with you about getting everything on to our engage Amherst website and our HR website. I think what Irv said about an executive summary and limitations of the data might be good things that we that I that we can work on so. Together I'm based on our conversation today just highlighting the points I made today I'm happy to and I do apologize for having to run but the conversation was very good and I'm available you all know where to reach me I think at least many of people. So feel free to reach out. I'm here and Susan thank you so much and I also want to do a shout out a lot of this work was done by Mike McNally our research assistant on this project so he deserves a lot of the credit. I will take care of everyone. And so I see, I know Dr Rhodes you have a question I also saw that Paul's hand was up previously so I don't know if your question was answered Paul and the process there. Yeah, it kind of was I think Susan talked about I was going to ask about ground truth and some of this information but you did address it in terms of like if Irv walked around his neighborhood and said I know what the number is, and you answered that so I appreciate that. Okay, Dr Rhodes. So Susan would you go back to the that these bar graphs, in terms of the town and, and the ethnicity is what was interesting to me was the shared a population and relationship to the white population from the last census to now, in terms of that, decreasing. So help me find the space that you're thinking about here. You go back up to the bar graphs that. When we were talking to a male car. You hear, yeah, you're coming up on it now right there. The percent point change. Right. Well, so yeah. What I found interesting was the decrease in the population of whites over that period of time. Yeah, and that's, that's a phenomenon that you're seeing all around the state and perhaps all around the country and a lot of it is going. A lot of it is ending up in the two or more races or that the some other race. So it doesn't look like it on this, on this particular graph, but around the state you're seeing in a pretty significant increase in the some other race alone which is everything to do from the new way that the Census Bureau is coding responses, and also people attribute it to like the increase on like people taking, you know, DNA tests and, you know, self reporting, maybe a broader range of heritage, and also just set up the census, census population by race changes from decade to decade, even if the people don't change, because it is self reported and people self reporting also changes over time. Interesting. Thank you. Alexis. I feel a little bit embarrassed asking this. What is it? What does it mean some other race? What is, what is that? Can you explain what that even because I see, I see races listed here. And then I guess I'm like what in, because I'm even confused and I guess someone who has grown up confused about the boxes that you have to check, you know, what, what is the right answer. And then maybe there isn't one but like what is, how should I know if I should check other. Well, again, this this is like self identity. And I think, you know, one of the things coming out of the fact that some other races increasing. It's not that people are getting it wrong. It's more like the Census Bureau questions and the OMB categories aren't capturing accurately what what people have people identify themselves. So they're, you know, people will write in another response. And if the Census Bureau doesn't have it kind of, you know, a category kind of for that. They'll put it into some other race. What's very strange about the coding this time is that, for example, there's and the Census Bureau has a blog on this I wish I had that pulled up but I don't right now. But it gets into the, the very detailed on how the code was done this time around and you'll see that like if somebody put white and Cuban. They could have been put into some other race, or two or more races. They would be put into white, white plus some other race. Whereas I think historically they might have been like, Oh, well, the Census Bureau might have said well, you're, you're white so we'll use white as your race and then we'll use Hispanic as your ethnicity because they think of those two separate categories.  So it's, it's a little bit hard to disentangle, but it's a good question but I can, I can just tell you that whatever you're writing down there's there's no wrong answer. You know as you identify. Right, but I guess, and this is the last thing I want to say but I guess it's like kind of like to what, to what extent is it the reality and then your personal feelings like my mom can't like she might feel, which is not the reality but like she can feel whatever small percentage of white she is but like that doesn't change her like how, how she navigates politically and so I guess I'm wondering like is it, is it purposeful to entangle ethnicity and race, or is it simply that that you want that there is a desire to like broaden what those things mean or like kind of like combine the two like I guess I'm wondering like what to what to what point and like to, like to what benefit. Is it to label Cuban as a race. That's a broad, that's a broad question that I don't know if I'm the person to answer, you know, for the OMB categories or the Census Bureau categories as, as, you know, or the lot the logic that you know these long standing institutions have put up or have put up you know, and then I do know that they're, they're doing research and they have been doing research to kind of keep questioning those categories. I mean, it sounds silly but like in 1850, you would choose which state of Germany you came from on a census form. Basically that doesn't that has no meaning today. As, as the race categories that we're checking off today will probably have very little meaning in the future.  Kind of catching up and lagging sometimes by decades so, so that's a very fuzzy answer to a, you know, a question that I can't, can't completely wrap my arms around in a sound bite. Thank you for trying that Susan. That was a complex question. And, okay. Yes, Yvonne, and I am aware of the time I know that we had talked about this meeting being one hour we still have another item to cover and we do have to do public comment. So I'd like to go to Yvonne, and then maybe we will thank Susan and wrap this up at least for today. Yeah, I'll be really quick because I wanted to comment on what Alexis is saying and just for us moving forward as far as what this sense of data meet data means and how we can use it. I mean, this data, even though it's for purposes of tabulation is also a very political issue. And in lots of ways, I would say, you know, I'm, you know, similar to credit reports, which is also another really political system that can often support systemic racism. You know, you know, meant to not maybe it's not meant to do that, but it can be that. And so I feel like when we're reading this data, going back to what I said before about like local knowledge as well and being able to, I mean, often, you know, people of color are not available to fill out the census out there.  You know, I think that it's a difficult process for us to figure out how we get at the folks that we want to get at and using this data, just keeping in mind that often this is skewed against the people that we're trying to reach, you know, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So it will be good for us as as an assembly to really talk about how we want to use this and sort of those layers that have been brought up. So Susan, I want to thank you for being here and for presenting and also for answering questions, and we will certainly follow up with any additional questions that we have. Thank you. Happy to happy to help and thank you. Thank you for all of your questions and for looking into all of this. Thanks. Okay, thank you. All right. So we are, I'm going to go to public comment right now before we move on to our next agenda item. Paul, feel free to stay or go whatever you need to do. I know we have a big meeting tonight. Thank you so much for being here. And so I'm going to read the public stop comments statement. During the public comment period, the chair will recognize members of the public when called on please identify yourself by stating your full name, pronouns and residential address residents are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes at the discretion of the chair based upon the number of people who wish to speak no speaker concede their time to another speaker. The chair will not engage in a dialogue or comment on the matter raised during public comment but we will be listening intently. So if you have, if you would like to make public comment please go ahead and raise your hand and we will bring you in. So not seeing any public comment but thank you to all of those who attended today we really appreciate your support and being here, and please continue to join us when you can. So, let's go ahead and move. Just a time check we talked about this meeting being one hour. I do want to be sure that we have at least a plan for the mass humanities grant because it's due. It's going to be due soon. So we need to make sure at our next meeting that we've finalized it. And I just want to say a huge thank you to Hala for putting together the draft that you've put together. I hope some of you have had a chance to look at it it's in the packet. I'll bring it up in a minute but I just really want to thank you for that it was so helpful to see all of the questions, what was being asked of us, and all the thought that you put into it so I think we have a great foundation to begin with here. And so, Alexis, I see that your hand is raised. Yeah, thank you, Hala so much. You look fabulous by the way. So I was going to work on it in these next like two days and add things to it but I guess I was wondering how do I share this without violating anything. Yeah, so we can't. We have to make a decision about how we want to go about this. So it's now been posted in the packet, what how drafted has been posted in the packet. So I think we have a couple different options. One option is if we want to work on it between now and our next meeting which I think we need to. I think we'll want to schedule a meeting. And I'm going to let Jennifer speak to this but I think we'll want to schedule a meeting. I don't know that you can work on it. I think you can what you can do is you can send your comments to myself and Jennifer and then Jennifer can send those out to the committee but Jennifer please speak to that. We could do it that way. I mean the other thing that could just happen is that everybody could make their comments and send them in and we could try to create one working doc and then have a meeting about it and then move forward from there. I think that would be a great idea so we, we had talked about two pieces. So, yeah, this one being a piece that we're all trying to contribute to, and then the community survey questions that we were all going to be contributing to to put together a document so because what do you think are you comfortable with sort of putting together your thoughts and ideas and even even editing a document if you want you can use a track change or whatever and then just send them to myself and Jennifer, and we'll incorporate everybody's suggestions into one document and we'll make sure to give credit where each person's, you know, feedback came from. I think that works. Okay. Yes, that sounds good and I have to bounce so okay. Thank you. Thank you. Hi Alexis. So, and holla. Is there any I just wanted to turn it over to you to talk about this document if you'd like to. I can pull it up. I think I have items that you wanted to just sort of get us to weigh in on or that were in particular challenging. So would you be okay with me sharing it on the screen right now. Okay, great. Hang on one second. I think I have it here. Let's see. Okay, I think this is it. So, I'm going to turn it over to you holla. Um, I don't know if that's necessary. I will say, I mean it's fine but I've never done this type of thing before and it really got me thinking about how we can further deconstruct some of these institutions that are like this feels like a gatekeeping thing not understanding and having to Google it and then finding this other document, but that's off the point for now but eventually I'd like to make some of these more accessible things that more accessible for the community at large. I'm at an 80 acre school right now so I apologize for the background noise. I just did what the best I could I made up a budget but that's not a real budget. I was just, they said it also doesn't have to be completely known for the letter of intent they're like you could just have you're not going to have some ideas about this type of thing. So, if anybody sees a whole like I know Ivan is amazing at this type of thing. So I would love her and Alexis especially but I know everybody on this committee has done some of this work too. So, just know this is my first go. I was happy to get my feet wet and I appreciate all the feedback that will come forward to make this a great letter of intent. That's okay. Thank you so much. Yeah, you've gone. Hold on. Am I going too fast here I can wear. Can you hear me. Yes. Yeah, it's hard to see the mute button when you're sharing the screen. I read through it and I think it's fascinating. You know, Holly, you did a great, great job. I think it's wonderful. It's so clear. And what what the goal is of the part. The only two goals that I see are the things we should discuss. One is that they're going to ask who the people are and how we're getting at the people that we're interviewing. Because they're, you know, you're talking specifically that that this is for honorarium to people for sharing their story. So then the logical question is well who are those people and how are you getting at them. You know, is there a public for people to is there an interview process. Focus groups are there, you know, so I think we might not going deep into it just maybe a comment about how we recognize that there has to be an equitable way at getting at the stories that we're including right. You know, and I think the other one was about money. The what what the how we broke down the money. Is that the budget piece. Let's see. Yeah. Because if I get through this, that's what I would ask. I'd be like, so like, who are you interviewing and then. Oh, also, there was a little bit about whether it was a presentation or a video. There's a little gray area about whether and what the end result would be. So maybe we want to flesh that out more and maybe there's more than one product. You know, like, are we applying for a video or we're applying for a presentation. Is this something that's going to be made available to the public after it's put together, or after it's done. Yeah, how are we going to how are we going to impact the rest of the community with this thing that we create. Yeah, that's a great question. And I wonder how it has a response to that. I also see that Jennifer's hand is raised, I believe. Yeah, I just want to say so one of the problems that the CSWG ran into was when we wanted to give folks gift cards for participation of the survey and the town cannot do that. And that ended up happening because we contracted out with seventh generation, seventh gen, and so they were able to do that and that was included into their contract fees, but I just, I 100% believe that people should be compensated for for contributing their stories and their life and their experiences. But we just have to find a way that we can do that. Okay, that's a good Paul question and I can talk to him about that and see. I had thought that the age friendly and dementia survey included a gift card but they also worked with a consultant so there's some yeah. Well, that's a great, we need to ask that question so I'll note that. And how I don't know if you had a response to what Yvonne had mentioned about sort of the impact piece and being more clear about that. I had just sort of left it open because I thought we were like still figuring it out, even like just throwing in the honorarium because I do think our labor compensation but yeah. I thought we were going to do a documentary, but then I was like, Oh, maybe we would have a presentation of the documentary. But yeah, no, I just, I was drawing some stuff on there that we could then discuss which we're doing now which is awesome. And the budget doesn't add up to the total amount because I don't. This is an Alexis thing maybe she'll know more about cost, because she works in that industry. And you too. Absolutely yeah. And I think what Dr. Shabazz had suggested last week that we had consensus around was instead of sort of Alexis had brought up the macro micro. So instead of going for the macro documentary right now doing some of the micro work. So, focusing on these oral histories maybe for residents or former residents of African heritage and then letting that be sort of a foundational piece of the bigger documentary piece. But I was saying documentary.  I wasn't meaning the whole. It was just the oral history part of the documentary. Got it. Okay. That's helpful yeah. All right, so what I'm going to ask is that if there aren't any other comments or questions right now on this if we could send in and think about this, you can send in bullets, you can send in a fully, you know, tracked document with suggestions, you can send in a narrative, whatever is your style, whatever works for you, whatever will encourage and motivate you to send the feedback in please consider that and we'll want to at our next meeting and we'll just talk about that briefly in terms of timing. We'll have to really solidify this so we have basically a week. We had talked about at our next meeting also reviewing survey questions. So now the homework has doubled, which means if you haven't sent in survey question ideas. Please also send those in in any way that works for you. And even if it means calling myself or Jennifer. I know Jennifer's plates full as is mine but I'm happy to take a call from somebody with ideas and I can, you know, I can jot them down and put them in the packet so whatever works. So we can tell you our feedback and every question so we have to email either you or Jennifer. Email both of us just so that we both get it and then we'll work together to put it into a bigger document the same with this humanities. Yes, exactly. Okay, both both would be great. I just want to clear something again because part of it was somebody had come in so I didn't hear the full conversation about the honor ania honor I always say that wrong so don't. But if it's coming through a grant and that's part of the grant then I think that's different. Okay, that's good to know. Alright, so if we receive a grant, then we can include that is what you're saying and just make sure that's in the budget. Okay. All right, good. So we had talked about meeting next week at 3pm. Is it possible and I'm sorry to do this my son has an every other week doctors appointment. And so would it be possible to do 315. Next week for folks. Any objection to that. Okay. All right, so we'll do 315. Jennifer and I will get an agenda out and but you basically you know that the agenda is going to include a finalization of the letter of intent for mass humanities, and the beginning of developing the survey questions for our community survey. And minutes and minutes we will get to those minutes. We'll add some more. Great. Did you have something to ask. Nothing to ask. Something to add. But to say that the age, needs to understand that with this information that's forthcoming, and that we've received and reviewed today from the Donahue Institute that that information is a first for this time. Because it's not only was important in terms of African American community, but the community at large has never seen this kind of data. There have been large segments of the community have always asked the question, how, what is the impact of students on our population, how many students are even counted in our population. This is the first time this is ever going to be made public when this goes up on our dashboard on our website. Yeah, thank you for really like bringing that into full awareness because it's absolutely true. I can say that when I have talked about it, and in particular, and I'd love to share more details about the reparations conference I went to in DC this weekend but this is a model that other communities can use and can learn from. Our process isn't going to be perfect and I really just want to thank you Dr Rhodes for initiating the contact with Carrie and the Donahue Institute and sort of realigning us when we needed it and pushing us forward with this because I do think that it's a really fantastic piece of our work and and as you said something that has not ever been done. Right and the Council, the Council will applaud us for this work. Good. Well I'll let them know tonight I've already, you know we had counselors here today which was really nice. I got to mention that on a devlin devlin goffier was with us. She had come in a little bit later after I recognized, and also Dorothy Pam was here today so I'm really happy in addition to Lynn and Paul that was great to have those folks with us. So. Are there any other questions or comments. Okay, then I'm going to move to adjourn the meeting at 424pm and thank you everybody for everything. Thank you everyone. Bye. Bye.


What you're about to see are the events that led to the Golden Gate Estates Fire burn over on January 30th 1985. There was one fatality and 11 injuries. The Golden Gate Estates Fire occurred near Naples, Florida and was the prelude to one of the worst fire seasons on record in the state. During mid-January a series of strong cold fronts had pushed through Florida. The successive freezes from these fronts killed and dried out normally green vegetation making conditions tender dry. Additionally there was no significant rainfall during January. The fire season had already been very active and firefighters were stretched to their limits from working abnormally intense fires that were driven by the strong winds from these frontal systems. This unusual weather pattern had put firefighters off balance from their routine fires which were influenced by normal diurnal winds. These normal winds consisted of light morning land breezes followed by strong afternoon sea breezes. The fire was arson caused and started on or about January 26th. Tractor plows and engine crews worked the fire for several days and contained it on January 29th at 10 thousand acres. The fire occurred as the trailing edge of the last cold front passed over the area. Normal winds had returned by January 29th. Fire crews were extremely fatigued getting only two to four hours of sleep at night. Fighting fire by reaction they were not recognizing the unusual weather pattern and the resulting changes in fuel moisture and fire intensity. In the process of containing the fire several near-miss situations had occurred. The fire had overrun several firefighters causing tractor plow units to be abandoned. On the morning of January 30th the fire rekindled. This rekindle was on the north flank of the original 10,000 acre fire that had been contained the day before. Fire crews dispatched to initial attack the rekindle considered it a routine fire. The routine view of the fire was based on the return of normal diurnal winds. The previous day's weather had been humid and the winds were light. Weather observations taken on January 30th at 10 hundred hours at the Naples airport were temperature 67 degrees, relative humidity 54 percent. Wind south at 14 miles per hour. Naples is on the coast 15 miles west of the fire location. It should also be noted that the daily weather observations for the fire behavior indices were taken and calculated from the Florida Division of Forestry District Office in Fort Myers 30 miles to the north. The differences between the predicted and actual weather caused fire crews to view the fire behavior indices as less than accurate. Suppression actions on the rekindle began south of the Golden Gate Canal shortly after 10 hundred. The objective was to keep the fire south of Golden Gate Boulevard due to the number of structures north of the Boulevard. The fire was burning in what local firefighters called the blocks. This was a subdivision with a road system that divided the area into rectangular blocks that were a quarter mile wide by one mile long as seen in this aerial photo. South of Golden Gate Boulevard the subdivision had a few scattered homes but was mostly wildland fuels. Fuels in the area were varied. About half the area was heavy rough of Palmetto Galberry under southern pine interspersed with grass and small cypress. The remaining fuels were cabbage palm with an understory of wax myrtle grape vines and grass. This understory was 12 to 20 feet tall and indicated that fire had been excluded from the area for many years. Four Florida Division of Forestry tractor plow units arrived at the scene between 10 hundred and 11 hundred.  By 1130 two of the tractor plow units were overrun by the fire and the operators suffered from burns and smoke inhalation. These were the first injuries on the fire. A third unit became stuck in a ditch. The remaining tractor plow operated by forest ranger Shane Sullen continued to work the right flank of the fire unassisted. At about 1200 another near miss occurred. Five engines from the local fire department were parked nose to tail headed in on a narrow dead-end road. The wind shifted threatening to overrun 18 firefighters and their equipment. The wind shifted again allowing them to successfully defend their position. As the day wore on initial attack efforts became more fragmented and additional tractor plow and engine units were requested. At 1430 forest ranger Marco Miranda radioed the incident commander that his tractor plow was fire ready. Miranda had been at the Naples Work Center repairing his equipment. His tractor plow unit had been abandoned in a near miss situation the day before. This had caused damage to the plow tires. The IC directed the 26-year-old Miranda to proceed to the fire. Miranda had been with the Division of Forestry for 10 months. He had completed his basic fire training in October 1984 and had worked about 20 fires in his tenure with the Division of Forestry. Just after 1430 the fire spotted over the Golden Gate Canal. It crossed into four blocks bounded by 9th Street on the east and 17th Street on the west. A county road grader put a quick line around a spot fire in the block between 11th and 13th streets and then moved on. Other spot fires pushed by southeast winds quickly moved north through a two block area bounded by 13th and 17th streets and another block between 9th and 11th Streets. At this same time mechanic Frank Smith was leading an out-of-district tractor plow crew into the fire. Smith had worked 15 years as a firefighter with the Florida Division of Forestry and had previous firefighting experience with the states of Ohio and Missouri before becoming the district mechanic. Smith led the crew from Ocala in along the canal from the west. He was working with the air attack pilot Connie Ryan trying to place the crew on the head of the fire before it bumped Golden Gate Boulevard. Looking for the left or west flank Smith passed by 19th Street and proceeded north on 17th Street believing this to be the western extent of the fire. Halfway up the street he found the fire had already crossed 17th Street and was moving west toward 19th Street. By the time he arrived on Golden Gate Boulevard the fire had already spread north across the boulevard in the block between 17th and 19th Streets. At approximately 1455 Miranda drove east on Golden Gate Boulevard past Smith's location to the intersection of 11th Street. At this time it was decided by the IC that the air attack pilot would direct Miranda into position on the left flank or where he was needed the most. Initially Miranda was directed to turn south on 15th Street. Then the pilot noticed that the block between 11th and 13th Streets was beginning to burn. This was a rekindle of the spot fire initially suppressed by the road grader. The pilot then directed Miranda down 13th Street. At this time mechanic Smith got on the radio and said he would escort Miranda to the site. The pilot's last instructions to Miranda were grab the first piece of fire you come to and do the best you can. Smith led Miranda down 13th Street where he helped Miranda unload his tractor. The point Smith picked to start Miranda was about 1100 feet south of a home under construction. According to Smith the fire was just moving around another house about a quarter mile south of the offload point. Smith observed two sheriff's deputies putting water on the house and said that the fire was not all that intense. It was later measured to be four tenths of a mile from that house to where Miranda started his plow line. The smoke from the fire was observed by Smith to rise about 100 feet level off and move north. Some of the smoke seemed to be pulled back into the fire. At this time Smith said that flames were not visible in the block that Miranda was about to plow in between 11th and 13th Streets. He told Miranda to plow only in third or fourth gear to give him time to put a couple of lines in across the block and maybe stop it at that point. His experience was that most new firefighters tended to plow in lower gears.  Looking south Smith saw a wall of flame moving toward their location. This was less than five minutes after Miranda had started his plow line. He had progressed less than 250 feet from the road. Smith immediately called Miranda on the radio and told him get out come out of there. As Smith back down the road to get away from the fire he saw the headlights from the tractor turn back toward the road. Less than a minute later the fire overran Miranda's location. After the flame front passed Smith returned to Miranda's plow line starting point and tried to walk the line looking for Miranda. He was forced out due to the intense heat and smoke. Later two firefighters with air packs went down the plow line and located Miranda's body as you see here next to his tractor plow unit. Using data from two nearby weather stations the investigation team reconstructed the weather for the time of the burn over. Temperature 78 degrees, relative humidity 33 percent, wind southeast at 20 miles per hour. The winds had shifted several times earlier in the day and the fire had also jumped roads and a 60 foot wide canal. Significant fire behavior observations were made independently by personnel on the fire. Forest ranger Shane Sullen said the fire seemed to breathe and pulse. Race 20 to 30 yards then lay down then pick up and run again. Mechanic Frank Smith saw the wind suddenly increase enough to raise debris from the ground and tear a rag from his hand. Others described the fire as just standing up and moving forward. The peak rate of spread at 1505 was estimated to be 20 chains per minute with flame fronts moving in three directions.  When the two fingers of the fire pulled together and made the run that entrapped Miranda, nine other firefighters on three different sides of the fire received burn and smoke inhalation injuries. In a witness statement by the pilot Connie Ryan he said he directed Miranda to 13th Street because he felt the block to the east between 11th and 13th Streets had just begun to burn at the south end and was not an immediate threat. He thought there was a possibility that with the wind at his back Miranda could put in a plow line from 13th Street to 15th Street that would hold as the flanking movement of the fire spread to meet his line. This tactic would enable him to keep the fire south of Golden Gate Boulevard. He then would have time to do the same in the next block or that the next crew in could do it. This is what he meant by his instructions to Miranda to grab the first piece of fire you come to and do the best you can. Instead Smith led Miranda in, told him to unload and plow an indirect line from 13th Street to 11th Street and back. Smith made sure Miranda had plenty of distance over a quarter mile between the plow line starting point and the south end of the block. However, 13th Street was as far east as Smith had been on the fire. As a result Smith was unaware of the large finger of fire that had extended past them to the east in the block bounded by 9th and 11th Streets. You have just seen the events that occurred on the Golden Gate Estates Fire. The instructor will now facilitate a discussion about the use of fire safety guidelines by the involved personnel, the strategic and tactical decisions that were made and the human factors that contributed to this burn over incident.


Hello everyone, welcome to the NPTEL course on remote sensing and GIS for rural development. This is week 12 lecture 2. In this week, we have been looking at the applications of remote sensing and GIS through case studies and live applications through dashboards and other data sources. In the last lecture, we looked upon the nabad boven collaboration dashboard where we looked at the locations of structures. So I will just showcase some more details that I have extracted just by going around with the software and website. So you can see here that we have Dahod region and I've selected the IGWP project, the Indo-German project, Watershed development project and of all states, Gujarat Dahod we have selected. You can see here Dahod I've selected and a period of 1 Jan 2012, which is the earliest until date yesterday, which is the latest. So we have around 1,936 points of data and you can click on this to see what it is. There is a particular and then there is some water rejuvenation, tribal social welfare society board. A farm pond has been created and then multiple photos of the farm pond has been made. Some processing livelihood options have been given for the tribals and then some slope stability have been done. So pasture land conversion of barren to pasture land etc. So all these are part of, these are bunds to slow down the runoff so that water stays and then rejuvenates the aquifer and soil moisture. So these are good for application and image is very qualitative. So it's an angled image and there's a lot of issues that can come with an image because maybe it is not taking the correct position, sunlight etc. So that is where satellite data added on to that will give a better application. So what we're going to do is we're going to show a study that has worked on this data and produce maps. In the meantime I've also selected Dahod region and for two time frames I have selected the data. So for example you have 1995, 01, 11. So Jan 11, 1995 I have data and then Jan 14, 2022 I have data. I can remove this one, March is out of the picture and then 1991 is also there. So 1991 can go above. So I've selected this in the meantime. I've shown you how to do it. You select Dahod, go to discover data. In the back to search you can search for data and then come to compare and then compare the data. So once you visualize you can go back to which data set you want and then you can add it to the visualization if needed. So I've done it. In the discovery you will find which data set in the search data set and then you will see which options you have and you want to add pins, different advanced options of time span etc. So here in the compare you could see that 1995 is on the top and on the bottom is the 2000, 1999. You could see that the water levels are increasing for the same month. Could be because of rainfall also but look at the NDVI, NDWI which is a water index are getting bigger. What is NDWI? We can see here green means less water, blue means more water. And so we could see that there's a lot of built up area coming up here and that is why you see a green color and then the blue color signifies more water. So on the top it is 995. I'm bringing it down. Now this is 1999 we are seeing and if I reduce 1999 you will see 2022. So in the 2022 frame beautifully you will see more water bodies coming up in Dahod which is a good sign of water being stored on the surface and being used for agriculture and stuff. So this is a crude estimate but let's see what we have done through studies and come back and revisit this aspect. So I will go back to my slide for today. Before we go into that I would like to introduce you the many options to look at applications of GIS do exist. GIS geography has a website in which there's a lot of data, accessories, carriers, analysis and then they are updated regularly some steps etc. I can just show you real quick if we click this we will open the webpage for the applications. So I'm just going to go to the screen where it is opening up. It is a screen one. I'm going to share and now you can see it. So you can see that the 100 applications have been done almost a year ago and just see how many rural applications can be there as agriculture, soil types, NDVI is big. So those who like to do NDVI you can know that it is one of the big applications and then Antarctica which is not part of us and then climate change, forest, agroforestry for rural development and then disaster monitoring, damage after an earthquake, ecology, habitat monitoring etc. So there's a lot and a lot of data around this line and you could see that how you could take aerial photograph also in the military time and then snap it to the current areas also you can do mining can impact rural development. So you can also map where the mining is happening, societal issues, human rights etc etc. So there's a lot of applications again solar panel, solar options is very very important for rural development that is also happening. So we have all these and then as I said we will get back to the presentation where we have this link posted and you feel free to go ahead and look at these options. Please remember that all these options do exhibit a cross-cutting team because rural development is a complex entity. There's agriculture and rural development, ecosystem and livelihoods, domestic use and sanitation has to be addressed and climate change which is hampering more on the rural development scenario has to be addressed. So all these are there and we have to be very focused on collecting data and mapping them so that we attenuate or reduce the impact on the ecosystems. So we have remote sensing identified for each and every parameter in this lecture. So for example, agriculture we use NDVI, NDWI, Landsat Images, groundwater from Grace etc, ecosystem, livelihoods which is mostly dependent on agriculture we have. We also maintained some aspects of some aspects of animal, husbandry and poultry farms, aqua farms etc. Domestic use we looked at groundwater, rainfall availability, farm ponds, water for geology and mission and of course climate change. We have shown how to use climate indicators and climate change scenarios from remote sensing estimates. So we have a lot of remote sensing for rural development case studies. The applications involve evaluation of NGO-based work. So this is what we have done in the first section which is today. We'll be looking at how to evaluate NGO-based work because NGOs are very focused on working on the ground. I've worked with multiple NGOs. I currently still work with NGOs and they are on the ground who are working very, very hard for the rural development, most of them I'm saying. And what they do is they work very closely with the farmers and stakeholders and bring them up in their potential adequate options. Salters are very low so not a lot of people you'll find in NGOs and even we are finding hard to send our students into those kind of streams because most of them want higher paychecks. But the point here is it is very, very related because with less money they cannot afford to build capacities for collecting data, monitoring their impacts. Suppose we have an NGO that is working on rejuvenating farm ponds or agricultural lakes. The idea is they will rejuvenate it. People have the potential benefits and they continue rejuvenating it. But normally what happens is they'll ask the farmers and people are you having water? And if they say yes, great water is coming then they happily move on to the next. But if someone else asks them what is the quantity? How much water has been improved? What is the metrics, the yield that has been improved? That is very hard to quantify for them because they don't have budgets for putting people on monitoring. They have budgets only to do the work. They don't have budget to do the monitoring and evaluation. So the assessment of impact is limited. And this is kind of sad because NGOs need to be accredited for their work and for the knowledge that they develop. If not then the system will collapse. If no one knows that the NGOs are working hard or not, then how will the funds come to the NGOs? So only the top NGOs that are very good, very well known will still establish. So it is important for them to do assessments and impact evaluations for which we have worked with a foundation in NGO called Dahod NMSaguru Foundation, which I have already told. And as I said, they have very less budgets for manpower and models and software to evaluate their impacts. Capacity is very low. We will need to build capacity for that and data acquisition, observation data is also not enough. So in this case, remote sensing and GIS can come very handy. In fact, they can alleviate all these stress on the system and bring a clear indication of their impact and work. So what method did we use? We used just some ground data that they had. I will go through the study very in detail and show you how quickly you could do and get published in a very, very good journal because I hope Masters and PhD students are also taking these courses. And it is very important for PhD students to write papers. What I'm going to show now is a student intern. He was not even a student under me. He was a student intern, just internship two, three months. He worked very hard and this paper through the team came out to be a very good journal paper. So time is also needed where we need to put a time on the assessment period. So you need ground data and time. That is all you need. So when did the structures or the investment or the infrastructure come in? That is the time. And ground data of the locations and that's it. The remaining satellite data can address. One more data we need is the rainfall. Again, even if the rainfall is not available from the ground, we can always estimate it through satellite products because we have satellite data coverage of rainfall for a long, long period. So this article had come in the NRF, the National Resources Forum, which is the official journal for the United Nations, a very, very prestigious journal. I'm very happy to say that a world by two interns have ended up in this, who are the third and fourth authors on this, who wrote along with me and one collaborator from Taiwan, and then the NGO person also. So number four is NGO. So you can see that the NGO person is also involved. So these NGO people normally don't have time to write papers or evaluations because they're always on the field. They have to work hard with the farmers. And since I've been on both the sides, I know exactly like how much time we have to spend on the field. And once you come home, you don't want to open the computer. It's just getting ready for the next day. So we as academics and institutions should support the NGOs who are on the ground working very hard with the people to bring up their livelihoods along with the government. So let's take this case study. We have worked on the Dahod district, and you can see Dahod is part of Gujarat. Gujarat is in blue in color. Then we have Dahod region, which is this part, again, blue in color. And then we have different basins, small smaller basins have been demarcated roughly from the data they had. And we can also take a DEM and then do the watershed analysis. But also what you found is there is a lot of check dams. So the idea here is the Dahod and NM Sathburu Foundation, the foundation is called NM Sathburu Foundation. They invested a lot of time, you can see here NM Sathburu Foundation, water and development foundation Dahod. They invested a lot of time in getting budgets for building check dams. And then they built the check dams for the farmers. They didn't stop there. So their mode is one more higher level where they formed village communities to use and manage the check dams through lift irrigation system and other things. So now we have our system which is blocking the water and then water stays on top, the surface water, and then some water infiltrates, percolates into the ground or lack of it, where most of the water is still there and getting pumped out using lift irrigation schemes to the farmlands.  And that was because it was initially a forest. So if the forest evolved with whatever rainfall it had and soil moisture, but now a lot of forest has been cleared and the clear land could not sustain any growth because of limited rainfall. The rainfall is very less around this region. We'll have the data to show what is the average rainfall. It is somewhere around 400 to 600 mm with some odd peak discharge and peak drought years. So we have all these sub basins classified after we had the location of the check dams. So only the check dams wherever they are, we mark the boundaries and we found that this specific boundary, the Hadaf river basin had more check dams. And we had selected that for further analysis as follows. So what we did is we first plotted the time. As I said, we needed time of ground data. So when did the check dams come? So approximately 1990, they started and they started keeping on increasing the check dams. So this is a cumulative graph of the number of check dams. You can see number of check dams increase steadily from 1990 to 2000. And then there was some slow development, not much development here. Maybe they were building larger check dams and it took some time.  So we used data until 2015. We wrote the paper around 2019 and it got published around 2021. So the idea here is we had collected the locations and the time of the check dams. So now you have 1990 to 2015 the check dams. So if you look at the rainfall and see how the indicators of soil moisture and plant growth happens, you will definitely see an increase because of the check dams because the check dams have a principle of storing the water and then letting it percolate and then the plants taking it out. So if you know that the check dams are coming into existence, especially this part 2000, 2015, a lot of big check dams came in. You could definitely see that for the same rainfall. The dashed line is the rainfall. So for the same rainfall, you will see higher peaks of the NDVI because they are giving more water in the storage rather than as runoff. So they're converting the rainfall into runoff and then keeping them in the system. So you could see here as the results. First let's see what is the NDVI value range. We have minus 2 plus 1 and the plus 1 is dense vegetation around 0.5 to 1. We have set good vegetation and as far as 3 to 5, 0.3 to 5 and then 0.1 to 0.3 is soil or rock structure, barren land and then we have less than 0.1 is no vegetation or water bodies. So you could see that the NDVI certainly increased a lot. All these are the different check dam basins that we saw here. So these are the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 basins which are given here also 3, 4, 5 plus rainfall. So rainfall is looked at this axis, right hand axis while the other all have NDVI in the left axis. So you could see that the dashed line rainfall ranges between 400 as I said 400 to 1,200 is the peak here but most normally around 800 and 600 the rainfall level comes up. And what happens here is you could see the response of the rainfall on the NDVI is changing. So if the rainfall is the same you would almost expect a similar NDVI because the water is being taken by plants and plants grow. But if you have storage then the water is being stored more in the storage tanks and those have access to plant growth soil and other components. So you could see here for a rainfall of around 1000 you have only the NDVI around 0 to 0 or negative 1. So most of the negative parts are here in the early stages. So check dams are coming but slowly they will improve the quality and then you could see that suddenly they start to peak and then go away from each other's obeisance especially more on the positive side even the rainfall is coming down. So that is the impact. So the impact here is even if the rainfall is coming down after let's say 2012 to 2015 and then 2020 even the total annual rainfall is coming down in this areas the NDVI is still increasing which shows that the structures are there who have buffered who have stopped the runoff from the system and kept the water into the ground water so that it can be used for crops. This is a very key finding in the exercise. Why? Because we assumed that NDVI would be constant without any change with rainfall and the check dams will have slight indication on the soil but it was not the case. Plans were happily extracting more of the water and growing healthy. You can see the NDVI is very healthy around 0.2, 0.3, etc. around sparse vegetation. So here you don't have dense vegetation because of the rainfall region and also it has been always like that for a long time barren land. So converting a barren land to some kind of crop land is very, very difficult but slowly it is happening thanks to the efforts of the NGOs, NMS of Guru Foundation and the check dam idea that they had. It was not super scientific. It was something that worked in the region and they just used it which is a basic, basic science. You don't need rocket science to save most of the world problems. You just need good science, basic fundamental science. So here the farmers are extracting more water. So how do you reduce it by adding more water structures that can capture the runoff and put it into the ground? You could see here this is another testimony of what is happening. We picked two years of same rainfall, 1991 and 2017, same rainfall. So someone should not ask us, oh, you took rainfall high year and showing high NDVI. So we wanted to make sure that the 1991 and the before and after are the same. So around 650 is the average rainfall and then for 2017, 2018 and 2016 it is almost the same. So there is no big flood before this event and this year and then we saw 2016 is okay but 2017 was better in terms of average rainfall 650 and 657 millimeters is almost the same. So let's assume that both are same. Just 7 millimeter difference is not big and now you could see a spatial distribution of the location of the check dam. So these are the location of the check dams in one of the sub basin which is Khan Basin and you could see that how the color has been changing from negative, the negative values are red and yellow to blue. So blue is happening a lot because and the water flows from top to bottom and then you have a lot of water that has been stored. So you can see a big, big blue color here which is being used for recharging and growing the plants. So NDVI value is really high. There is a lot of crop growth and crop diversification also which adds to this finding of increased NDVI. So we saw a graph of how it changed the average value of NDVI change across the Dahor district which is the previous one and at different timescale. So we have different sub basins and then different timescales from 1998 to 2020, we have the NDVI. But in the spatial resolution image, we picked two years, two years with similar rainfall pattern and precedence conditions and we looked at if the NDVI has sharp change and you can definitely see a bigger change in the top basin where most of the runoff is going to be held back and then stored for improving the soil moisture which improves the NDVI value. For NDVI, again we have the negative values as not water present in the soil and are not healthy water levels. So you can see here from the explanation of what is the NDVI, you could see that the NDVI value ranges from minus to plus and then vegetation has smaller values. So vegetation and built up areas have small values whereas the higher values are blue and that is what we are also seeing here. So here with negative values which is mostly the built up and barren land whereas the soil water capacity has been increased drastically and that you could see definitely in the drought years even though the rainfall is coming down, the NDVI value does not come down fast. Here we have used zero to one as the water body water content, the positive values are reflecting water content whereas negative to zero is bright surface with no vegetation or water content. So this is just barren soil, land built up and you have less water content in the soil. So inside the soil there is more water content and that is even true during the less rainfall year which is being supported throughout this image because of the use of satellite data to understand this phenomena. So you can see down by the difference of water index from 1990 to 2018 for the study sites in the whole of India and it clearly says that due to the increase of check dam the NDVI values have increased and also when the rainfall comes down the NDVI value does not plummet down at once because there is water storage in the water structures. So it will help to improve the NDVI and NDVI value which we see in this small exercise. This is very, very important because nowhere could you see that the NDVI is about peaking the rainfall data in a high extreme. So for example it's a positive rainfall, it goes positive but here the rainfall is going down and you should expect the NDVI and NDVI to go down but you could see that both are either stable, just stay stable or it goes actually up and the up is because of you have good water storage which is still recharging the surrounding area from the check dams. So with this I think we have looked into one exercise where we have this change in the rainfall pattern but still it doesn't negatively impact the NDVI value and that is purely because of check dams because check dams do have that potential of doing it. So this is a spatial recognition and as I said the NDVI may not change drastically because when these small, small vegetation shrubs are grown. If you go to NDVI, this region, the tribal region of Bahut, you'll see them mostly growing pickles, chillies, some fruits and vegetables like tomatoes, cucumbers, etc but not high value crops and crops that can cover the entire land. So NDVI would not be a great estimation but NDVI which talks about the water content is and you could clearly see that everywhere it was red during the 1991, 650 mm rainfall period but during the 2017, 657 mm rainfall period you could see that it has been improved from 0.03 to 0.1 to 0.5. So all of these areas converting back to positives and the positives is definitely due to the increase in recharge from the check dams and spatial distribution of the water to all these locations and all this was done without even going to the field because I know the field, I've been to the field but the student had only very limited time of 2 to 3 months to work on this. So we gave them the location of the check dams, gave them the theory that the check dams, the hypothesis, the check dams improve the NDVI or the null hypothesis, it does not improve the NDVI value for which we had extracted the values and then plotted it and then see visually comparison and also a very quantitative way of comparison because now we have the values, pixel values. So we can quickly say that 80% of these pixel values are above the red values. So that clearly indicates that the soil water content and the surface water body storage across the basin has improved drastically because of the check dams. You could also see more and more of this happening in the downstream areas because water can calculate from high elevation to low elevation and that is what you're seeing that the water comes down and then gets reallocated into multiple sectors. So those who cannot do this as a full exercise, this exercise is done like you download the Dahor map first step and then you can put it in the location of the check dams, download the rainfall, download the Landsat bands. Basic bands was for NDVI we had NWIR minus red and then NWIR plus red whereas for this NDVI you could use a different band which is given here. So normally it's different registration index you can have for Sentinel 2 I think we use Sentinel Landsat, Landsat images because those are older images so B3 minus B5 by B3 plus 5 and for Sentinel you can use B3, B8, B3, B8. So really good, really good data set that can help. These are very, very important indicators and that's why Sentinel Hub is also having it and you can clearly see that the difference between the images is very comparable so I'm just going to keep this image to the side here and then this can come to until Dahor half and then this can come here. So you could see that on the right side you have a Sentinel image from 2022 in JAN. So almost JAN let's say the same rainfall is happening, similar rainfall but you have better water bodies, number of water bodies and the number of water structures are really high which is really good to see whereas here you can see that it is all white this is no not enough water and this is also not enough water somewhere good water is there and then you have these big water bodies but all of this is being increased drastically much more deeper water levels are there and that is what is reflecting in the NDVI values. So with this I think we have showcased one study the time taken is very less two months is needed if you know how these GIS works and honestly I'm saying if the student knew how to work with this dashboard he would have done it within a month also so you can just include your area of interest download your data or upload your file for your boundaries and then after you log in you can just extract these data sets as needed and then you do have a data protocol to sign up and say I need this data and boom the data comes. So you could actually do wonders with this area of data and as I said you can add your shapefile of it so first basically we can make the shapefiles in GIS or Google platforms and then save it as a shapefile bring it here and then download the data so it's always easy to download the data from these sources it's legit it's a user space agency so you won't have big bugs while storing the data just be careful you don't have pop-ups which could have been done by previous installations of other softwares not QGIS okay so you can download this image as a jpeg you want to show options or not and then with no georeference or you can georeference it okay so you can download and then georeference also as I said you can do analytical basic download image option is there maybe they're asking you to pay initially these were also free to give free access to this but now you have to pay so the point here is you can quickly do these maps you don't have to take and subtract two images to calculate the values you can quickly do this and then estimate the differences based on the water that is being stored in the checkmaps and to be honest there's not a lot of these studies that have been done like this and one of the reasons that's why this has been accepted in a very very prestigious journal whether I would stop today's lecture and I will see you in the next lecture where we'll talk more about some applications from the group and how you can use RS and GIS for other signal thank you