Natural disasters wreak havoc across wide swaths of land, and geospatial data is essential to mount effective rescue and recovery efforts.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency contributed valuable tools in the response to the powerful earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25, according to two rescuers from Fairfax, Virginia, who spoke at NGA headquarters recently.
“We are the end user of the disaster atlases NGA creates,” said John Morrison, a member of Virginia Task Force 1, according to an article at NGA.mil. “In country, it’s hard to download large volumes of imagery.”
The team used NGA’s public Nepal earthquake website for some data, relying on Google Earth and other sources for more, said Chris Schaff, another member of VA-TF1.
“Having the public website with the map/area disaster map was tremendously helpful,” said Schaff. “We will push that out to the rest of the disaster community. If you need updated imagery, this is the place to go.”
Schaff and Morrison rescued two people from collapsed buildings during their time in the devastated city.
Gathering mapping data quickly that accurately reflects the suddenly-changed landscape is also critically important. Using OpenStreetMap, an open source data-sharing tool, more than 2,200 volunteers made more than 250,000 edits to the street maps of Nepal, according to Stacey Maples, the geospatial manager of the Stanford Geospatial Center in the Branner Earth Sciences Library at Stanford University.
Maples, according to an article the university posted, hosted workshops for mapping volunteers, and used post-earthquake imagery to find likely locations of displaced people.
The 250,000 edits made within the first two weeks after the quake were primarily intended to aid population estimates and rescue prioritization, and to add information about changes to roads and paths that the quake caused, Maples said.
Related: NGA launches support efforts after Nepal quake
NGA was able to mobilize quickly, launching the site the day after the disaster. It initially hosted search and rescue atlases covering Kathmandu and six other areas of Nepal, providing maps, imagery and data overlaid to assist rescuers and relief planners. It also offered apps for open data search, data services and mapping functions that included information such as damage assessments and population information.
The site is similar to one NGA made available for the Ebola response effort last October. Both sites use Esri’s ArcGIS online platform hosted by Amazon Web Services.
