A “SPATIAL” thanks to GIS!
After Hurricane Maria, hundreds of volunteers convened to remodel the map of Puerto Rico using GIS. In essence, geospatial data mapping helps us understand and extract meaningful geographical insights. Their aim — to build a new map of the significantly changed landscape to help the first responders.
Reportedly only 400 of 16,700 miles of roads were accessible after the devastation[1], leaving a check on navigation for the ground teams. Not just evacuation, ground teams are also responsible for medication, food distribution, crowd control, effective communication, pursuing strategic decisions, all in a finite time-space; thus it became crucial to develop a solution.
Volunteers analyzed pre- and post-disaster geospatial and satellite imagery of the landscape, subsequently adding entities and landmarks that never even existed in the former maps. A highly detailed map was generated and published on OpenStreetMap, aiding officials on the scene with an efficient navigating system accessible to them via mobile devices. Help thus reached relatively faster. This solution significantly helped the response teams better navigate the landscape, moreover communicate updates about further conditions to other teams.
GIS can be a helpful tool for those regions affected by disaster for disaster recovery and buildup. Organizations and individual researchers could come together to reproduce maps of such regions using geospatial data. Alternatively, with advancements in GIS, as a precautionary step, advanced real-time GIS can be deployed to automatically generate maps of regions where major shifts are happening in the climatic conditions.
[1]https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2018/09/us/puerto-rico-maria-then-now/
