GIS and Disaster Relief

My current focus topic is on the use of GIS to accelerate disaster relief. I did not see GIS being used to its fullest capability during the Kashmir Earthquake relief effort. Global Connections spearheaded a great effort to make imagery available, but I believe that we, as relief providers did not do a very good job of collecting and sharing the data which would let others know what we were doing and where we were doing it. A GIS like ESRI's ArcGIS is a good platform to capture and publish these data in a map form, but the software is costly and the computing requirements and training may make it "too hard to do" for many relief providers. Other platforms which we can use to share data are free programs like GoogleEarth. Many times I flew to areas which had already been visited by other relief providers. I know that at the same time we were missing other locations which desperately needed help. By creating a common operational picture of what was going on, what was needed, and who was where, we could have ensured better coverage and distribution of relief. I'm very interested in any thoughts or experiences in this or other relief efforts. Let me know what worked, what didn't and how you would do it better.

Research

This is an earthquake induced slide north of Muzaffarabad in AJK. Source - W. Thompson

My research interest is in improving disaster relief. While serving in Afghanistan with the 12th Aviation Brigade, I had the opportunity to deploy to Pakistan and participate in the disaster relief mission for the October 2005 Kashmir earthquake.

My dissertation work focuses in three areas:

• Improving Civil-Military working relations in the disaster relief environment.
• Assessing vulnerability in a community and recommending options for post-hazard relief centers.
• How we can better leverage geospatial technologies to accelerate relief and gain greatly improved situational awareness.
  

David Stauth of the OSU News & Communication Services wrote a very nice article about some of my activities Pakistan. You can access the article by clicking here.

Dr Robert Yeats' website has good information on the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. You may want to visit his site.