Nepal Earthquakes 2015 and Remote Sensing

On April 25th, the ground shook violently in Nepal. By the time the magnitude 7.8 earthquake ended thousands would die or be injured and hundreds of thousands would be homeless. Following an earthquake, there is the risk of aftershocks. While most aftershocks tend to be small some can even surpass the primary earthquake in terms of magnitude. Relief efforts were well underway when on May 12th, an aftershock with a magnitude of 7.3 struck.

Earthquakes in particular can create access issues. Infrastructure including roads and bridges may be destroyed or blocked by debris. In mountainous areas, roads that survive may end up being damaged or blocked by landslides. This creates additional issues in ensuring that relief is able to reach those in need who live in rural and remote areas.

Remote sensing is a tool that I would love to see being used even more to identify areas that have been impacted by a disaster. Satellite and aerial photos (and drones) can be used to identify which areas have significant structural damage and may even be able to identify ‘tent cities’, areas where people have set up tents instead of staying in damaged or potentially damaged homes. This information can then be used by the local emergency management agency and relief agencies to assist in directing their response efforts.

Depending on the extent on the impacted area, there can be a huge number of photos that need to be examined. The earthquakes in Nepal damaged a large area and there are thousands of photos that need to be meticulously combed through. This is where crowd sourcing can be a powerful method. I am most familiar with Tomnod, a site that uses crowd sourcing to identify areas of concern. This information is then given to disaster relief teams. It is pretty simple to use, although there are occasional glitches, and you can do it in your free time. It is a good way to help out and it is definitely needed in this case; the severity of the damage that I have seen during the Nepal earthquake campaign is mind blowing. If you are interested in volunteering, you can do so at http://www.tomnod.com

The Role of Hazard Knowledge in Emergency Management

So I know I still owe you a post summarizing the early March tornado outbreak in the U.S. I promise I will get to posting that shortly, the past few weeks have been kind of crazy.

In the meantime, since I am sitting in the airport waiting for my flight, I thought I would write a quick post on how hazard information can contribute to emergency management programs.

Ontario’s EM programs are required to be risked based which implies that at least some knowledge about the hazards is necessary to the development of a well rounded program. In fact, I would argue that hazard information should form the basis of such a program. After all, how can you prevent, prepare for, mitigate against, respond to and recover from a hazard if you don’t know what hazards could affect you and what their impacts (including secondary hazards) could be? Not knowing is pretty much the same as walking in the dark, it is reactive. You crash into something and react to it (usually with some loud swearing). Maybe you crash into something and the impact causes you to become disoriented and change your course (secondary hazard), causing you to slip on one of your dog’s squeaky toys. Knowing your hazards is like walking through a dimly lit room (since suprises abound in real life, the complete impacts and other factors can not be fully anticipated). You are able to see the chair leg you tripped over before in the dark and avoid it (prevention). Even if you still run into it, since some of us, myself included, are more clumsy than others, you may still be able to stop yourself from suffering a worse fall by grabbing the nearby table for support (mitigation).

I am a huge fan of hazard/risk/vulnerability mapping. These programs are not very common in Canada, although a number of organizations worldwide are currently developing them. The U.S. in particular has really embraced hazard mapping through programs such as HAZUS-MH. These programs are used for determining which areas are more likely to be affected, the magnitude of the impact, where shelters should be located, evacuation routes and many other things. Some programs can quickly run different scenarios, allowing you to plan for different magnitudes of hazards and different areas. These result in plans that are well-informed and based on real world data.

There is no substitute for experience, although being able to run a number of scenarios to simulate hazards can greatly enhance your EM capabilities since it comes the closest to experience when based on accurate data.