Esri Community Member Spotlight: Ellie Hakari
This series of member spotlights features you and your peers here in Esri Community—the people playing a role in finding solutions, sharing ideas, and collaborating to solve problems with GIS. We’re doing this to recognize amazing user contributions, to model how Esri Community’s purpose is being brought to life, and to bring depth to this group of incredible people who may never meet in person, but who benefit from each other’s generous expertise.
Watch Ellie's video interview in Kaltura
Natural Threats to Alaska Transportation
Typhoon Merbok struck Alaska on September 17th, 2022, ferociously clawing its way across more than 1,300 miles of the state’s coastline. In places, pummeling winds ripped siding and roofs off buildings while rising water and pounding rain unmoored houses from their foundations, flooded roads, and broke apart the landscape. The National Weather Service would come to describe Merbok as “historically powerful,” while others would conclude it as being the worst storm the state had endured in about half a century. Incredibly, and despite disastrous conditions, residents’ lives were spared.
Over the course of that one weekend, erosion stole more than 100 feet of coastline in places—exceeding loss that wasn’t supposed to happen for decades.
Events like Typhoon Merbok are on Ellie Hakari’s (@EH_Alaska) mind while working with the State of Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, where she wields GIS to maintain awareness of Alaska’s roads—the condition pavement is currently in and estimating future threats to roads. More importantly, she seeks to reduce risk to people who will be impacted if-and-when roads fail.
Alaska’s Historical and Predicted Pavement Condition Inspection Values map
of airport pavement (here) enables planners and the FAA to analyze the performance
of projects and provides a starting point for initiating new projects.
Ellie reminds that the typhoon was just one of a number of natural disasters that have struck Alaska in recent years. “We also had a massive earthquake in 2018 that destroyed roads,” Ellie points out, “which was a big deal considering that even our largest cities are typically ‘one way in, one way out.’”
“We’ve had wildfires, floods, wind storms, ice storms …,” she lists, “And the response to all these events relied heavily on Esri products. Maps to communicate locations, ArcGIS Survey123 to collect information from our staff and the public, ArcGIS Dashboards to filter for priorities, and ArcGIS StoryMaps to track and communicate progress.”
A Curious Road to GIS
If you were to follow the breadcrumbs that led Ellie to where she is now in her role at Alaska’s Department of Transportation & Public Facilities, you might get a bit dizzy. From civil engineering to early education, computer sciences, ballet, theater, arts, and music, Ellie spent her college years sampling a variety of possible careers. Like many navigating that early crossroads, committing to a single direction was anything but easy.
During her exploration, Ellie came across an internship that quickly turned into a full-time Materials Technician job.
“It’s dirt shaking, as we call it.” Ellie shares. “Kind of learning about how asphalt is pulled together.”
In this work, she found herself surrounded by engineers who were just beginning to leverage GIS in their work in new, interesting ways. Witnessing its applications in action first-hand—those that combined her love for art and math—Ellie’s curious nature took over and she declared her interest in learning more about GIS.
“ That’s when I came across Esri Community, and it just blew open the doors.
I learned everything I could. I soaked it all in and asked questions. ”
Ellie chuckles as she recalls the initial response she received. “I had a co-worker who was kind of heading that GIS effort at the time. Because I was new and an intern, I don't think he took me seriously. He just kind of threw an ArcMap textbook on the desk in front of me and was like, ‘OK, just read through this front to back, you'll learn some stuff.’”
She smiles at the memory. “I sat there and looked at the manual and thought, there's no way I'm learning anything from this.”
While Ellie identifies herself as the type of person who withers under the shadow of a thick textbook, she thrives on other forms of learning. Ellie turned to the internet to see what other people in the GIS world were doing.
“That's when I came across Esri Community, and it just blew open the doors. I learned everything I could. I soaked it all in and asked questions. People were more than happy to give me answers and that drove all my learning and experience. I'm so thankful because it's how I got to where I am now.”
Developing Nationwide Road Resilience
Ellie’s passion for GIS and her steadily growing talents garnered attention. In 2022, she was nominated to be on a project run by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Through this, she and a select group of participants have been focused on developing resources that can be used by transportation agencies across the country to assess risks to their assets and the public due to extreme weather, climate change, and other threats or hazards.
When she was first flown to Washington, D.C. for the project and met her new colleagues, Ellie felt certain that her presence must have been a mistake.
“I got in the room with all of these incredible people who are directors—you know, top level individuals—and engineers who have been in the field for decades. And then I’m a GIS Analyst. I was thinking: ‘What am I doing here?’”
No sooner had she questioned her own qualification to be in the room than the picture came into focus. Many of the people she found herself speaking to and hearing from worked in roles facing climate change. Like her, they were and are acutely tuned to the position of peril it poses to their own states and were seeking solutions.
Ellie was given assurance: Her involvement was no mistake. The group had awareness of the important role GIS could play in the work before them. Ellie’s understanding of data level analysis and processing would generate crucial insights needed to prepare their risk and resilience manual that will, when complete, serve the nation.
This convinced Ellie. “I was like, ‘OK, I do need to be here. I’m going to try and provide whatever I can to make sure that the final product is exactly what the U.S. needs.”
Life Changing Community
Despite the strides she’s made and the unmistakable importance of her work, Ellie is open that she’s long harbored some insecurities about her GIS journey. Her non-traditional route to GIS has, at times, struck her as contrasting with those around her—other GIS analysts, engineers, and geologists—people who went to school for what they wanted to do and confidently stayed that course into the heart of their careers. At least that’s the way it can feel to her.
Ellie resolved to put her assumptions to the test. Was her meandering, curiosity-driven career path to GIS really that uncommon? She logged into her leading resource for all things GIS, Esri Community, and posted her question: How many of you have fallen into a GIS career without a degree? After sharing a little about herself, she left it to others to fill in their own stories. And they did.
Esri Community Member @KarenCarr shares about their non-traditional route to GIS.
“I was so happy to hear from lots of people!” Ellie gushed. “We had biologists and journalists, people working in criminal justice … so many different avenues people started in that eventually morphed into GIS. I think it speaks to just how useful GIS is in just about everything.”
That communal reassurance that she’s hardly alone in her journey reflects the hallmarks of her experience on the platform. It’s also a big reason why she invests some of her own time back into helping other members who have questions.
“I was that person who had no idea what I was doing,” Ellie recalls of her own early days in Esri Community. “I'm sure I could look back and just cringe at some of my questions because I really didn't know what I was doing, but people were so patient, kind, and helpful. It's because of them that I've made it to where I am now.
She urges others to recognize the impact they’re capable of having on those learning the ropes.
“You can always share.” She encourages. “I bet you anything you’re going to change someone’s life because many people in Esri Community changed mine.”
Ellie Hakari is a GIS Analyst III for the State of Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities’ Office of Data Modernization and Innovation. Ellie works to ensure the integrity of Alaska’s roads and airports by monitoring pavement conditions and evaluating threats; including those related to weather disasters and climate change. She further uses GIS to provide the public with information it needs to understand impacts and needs of the roads they rely on for travel.
Typhoon Merbok sourcing:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/ab19c80f9a644d3a9741e56cde5a41ab
https://alaskapublic.org/2023/09/25/western-alaskans-remember-typhoon-merbok-a-year-later/
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/16/1123512183/alaska-typhoon-merbok-storm-coast
https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/storm-surge-in-alaska-pulls-homes-from-their-foundations/