Highways

Welcome new employee Christine Yamasaki to our DOT ‘Ohana!

Welcome Christi ne!W l Ch i ti !

By: Kara Yoshida

Name: Christine Yamasaki Job Title: Federal Program Engineer Start Date: July 1, 2019 Hometown: Honolulu. HI Degree: Oregon State University, BS Civil Engineering Family: 1 husband – Ryan; 2 kids – Aaron and Caralyn; 2 dogs and many fi sh Hobbies: I love reading detective books!

Past Job History: Engineer at Park Engineering, Hawaii Project Manager at DOT HWY-DD

Why she likes it at DOT: I like the people here, everyone is friendly. It’s always an adventure to learn new things. Some things are a challenge, but you just work though it and ask for help if needed. Everyone here is always willing to help.

What she’ll miss from her past job: HWY DD is fi lled with good people. They were all good at their job, which made it easy for me to do my job. Everyone worked together as a team to accomplish their goals.

Highways

Unmanned Aerial Systems Workshop

By: Casey Abe The Highways Division’s State Transportation Innovation Council (STIC) and the Hawai‘i Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) hosted a oneday workshop on Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) or drones, Aug. 8 at the Daniel K. Inouye (DKI) Airport Conference Center.

The objectives of the workshop were: (1) understanding the benefi ts and use cases for successful integration of drones; (2) gaining insights from North Carolina State Department of Transportation that has an established Drone Program; and (3) learning about applications for drones including, but not limited to, surveying, bridge inspections, traffi c and construction operations, rockfall and coastal highway data collection.

Approximately 50 attendees from federal, state and county government agencies, and private industry participated in the workshop. The Highways Division’s Materials Testing and Research Branch will be developing Divisional Guidelines on implementing Drones into their daily operations.

Once the guidelines have been completed, a followup workshop will be held on the new guidelines.

Drone workshop off ered to federal, state and county agencies.

What she wants to accomplish at HWY-S: I want to be like Scot Urada! I want to know what I’m doing and be an expert in my fi eld.

FUN FACT #8 Kilauea Point Lighthouse built in 1913.

Highways

New App Reports Current Lane Closures

By: Maaza Christos Mekuria

Lane closure processing La application is coming your way. ap

New Employees Join DOT ‘Ohana

By: Maaza Christos Mekuria

HDOT HWY-Admin is H preparing for a rollout of p the lane closure web-based th application to streamline the a entry, approval and reporting e of lane closures across the o highway department sections. h s.

This involves generating, d approving, disseminating and implementing the fi eld lane closures for the many inhouse and outside requests on HDOT’s facilities across the Islands.

Chris de la Torre is avid biker.

New employee Zero Wu likes to play video games. Wu l k ikes s

Notice a few new faces in Highways? Meet Chris de la Torre and Zero Wu.

Chris de la Torre is one of the newest engineers to be part of the Hawai‘i Department of Transportation (HDOT) Highways Division.

He is working under the Highways Administrator in the Project Coordination and Technical Services Section as a Civil Engineer.

He has already began working with other sections within the DOT-HWY in implementing the Geographic Information System (GIS) based spatial tools using ArcGIS & Survey123 modules.

Chris’s extensive educational background include a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Southern University in 2017.

The project began over a year ago and has been progressing from study to prototype and is now ready for implementation across the enterprise.

The idea was conceived by HWY-A to advance DOT’s motto of “one entry and many uses” that Gina Belleau of HWY-A has been promoting for a while.

The application is intended to help improve standardized data entry and is being implemented in-house by HDOT engineers.

It involves an electronic data entry form using a tool called Survey123 by ESRI makers of ArcGIS software and some underlying custom programs that process the lane closure location data into a map based approval dashboard.

The data entry form as well as the

FUN FACT #9 Aloha Tower completed in 1926.