AHS senior creates emergency shelter map

TEXARKANA, Ark. — An Arkansas High School senior recently attended the Education Accelerated by Service and Technology conference to share the digital local disaster planning map he created.

Seth Sexton created the map to assist locals who do not have proper shelter in their homes in the event of a disaster.

“The past couple of years I’ve made different maps, starting in fourth grade. I’ve made a map about service time, so how fast an ambulance would take to get to the school I was at in College

Arkansas High School senior Seth Sexton created a Texarkana Disaster Preparedness map to provide assistance to locals who don’t have proper shelter in their homes in the event of a disaster. Sexton recently attended the Education Accelerated by Service and Technology conference and shared his map during the ArcGIS portion. (Staff photo by Mallory Wyatt.)

Hill, and since then I’ve just kept making maps,” he said.

Sexton said he comes from a family of mapmakers and that his grandmother Joy Sexton owned a map shop. “In sixth grade, I made a map about the Phantom Killer and mapped out all the locations that he killed people. And then in ninth grade, I made a map about healthy eating locations, gyms and parks in town. And now, I don’t know, I just thought of it (a disaster preparedness map) one day and I thought it’d be a cool idea — so I just ran with it,” he said.

Sexton said he made the map by finding statistics on local creeks and rivers that are prone to flooding and combining shelter location information from the Miller County Office of Emergency Management.

“And then I map those using ArcGIS, which is a mapping software,” Sexton said. “You can isolate different locations and map it. It does take a long time to get the hang of it. It took me years to really understand the whole program of it.”

Sexton said he plans to go to school for business and hopes to do mapping for businesses and land surveying so he can map different parts of Texarkana and any other city.

Sexton’s teacher and EAST facilitator Carla Phares said she has known the teen since he was a freshman and that she has watched him grow in his craft of mapmaking.

“Every year he brings something bigger to the table, and he’s grown a lot this year,” Phares said.

Sexton said he also has plans to turn his disaster planning map into an app that will be available on the iOS app store.

To learn more about the disaster planning map, visit tinyurl.com/295yr8py.