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Argyll GIS Manager Darren Connaghan flies to Haiti to support MapAction - 28.01.10
Argyll GIS Manager Darren Connaghan, flew to Haiti at short notice to support MapAction with the relief effort. Communication has been difficult but we have received some brief news posts direct from the team on the ground.
MapAction Report on January 26th 2010
Over the past 48 hours, the Search and Rescue (SAR) phase has wound down and today is planned to be the last time the teams will be out around the city. They have been tackling the horrible task of corpse extraction from collapsed buildings. This obviously was not a priority while there were still live victims but now the teams are recovering the bodies they can get at, often at painstaking and heart-rending effort, so that at least some families can bury their relatives before the buildings are eventually bulldozed. Members of our team have been out with these missions and it's obviously a poignant end to what has been a week of hope and sometimes of joy - more than 120 lives have been saved by the international teams and the teamwork involved has reportedly been exemplary. Team after team is popping up as 'Mission Completed' on the Virtual OSOCC (Operations Coordinating Centre) and are going home to a well deserved rest.
The SAR phase was relentless for all involved - and our team was involved heavily. But the mission now continues for us. Everyone is trying now to catch up on at least some sleep. Despite being very close to the airport, it has been a world away in communication terms with the internet off and on all the time. Even satellite phone calls are difficult to use due to the large numbers of aircraft taking off and landing every few minutes. Yesterday using technology based in the UK we managed to get a precise fix on the SAR team by the simple expedient of getting their Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) coordinates and then pinning these to the new high-resolution images of Port-au-Prince in Google Earth. We even managed tell them which tent they were in (the orange one), of course they knew they were there but the use of this type of mapping technology is vital in helping the relief effort.
The next big priority for our work is information for shelter needs. Tens of thousands of people are still completely without shelter. So far about 500 camps ('spontaneous settlements' as the government has termed them) are known to have sprung up. These need to be located and mapped to allow the Shelter Cluster to coordinate delivery materials such as plastic sheeting, plastic buckets and other life sustaining basics. The information about camps collected so far by the other charities does not have any coordinates, only addresses or partial addresses. Various organisations are attempting to geo-code the list (provide spatial co-ordinates), including the US military, the OpenStreetMap community and even a group of local volunteers going around on scooters with GPS receivers.
The setup at the new base is cramped. Today some SAR teams are helping to scavenge for bits of furniture around the city. There is apparently now a shower, although shared between 80+ people!
The next stage of our task is likely to be for Map Action to take the lead in establishing the Geographical Information System (GIS) capacity for the next stage of the relief effort which centres around gathering useful spatial information to help the survivors.
Short report from Hamish (a MapAction Volunteer) received last week 23rd/24th January
Tonight one of the rescued survivors of the earthquake came to thank the relief team. He is a Danish United Nations employee who was buried for five days in the rubble of Hotel Christopher in a space about 5 feet long, 2 feet wide and 1 foot high, having dived under his desk when the quake struck. His one contact with the outside world during this time was a wrong number call he received in a moment when the mobile network wasn't jammed (the caller hung up before he could pass a message!). He was heard tapping by one of the SAR teams tasked to the site. We tasked several teams to this collapse. MapAction played a big role in running SAR support centre, its staffing has been about a quarter Map Action volunteers for much of the time.
Yesterday, we tasked a UK SAR team to a school collapse and Naomi and I deployed with them. Unfortunately we found no survivors and 50 to 100 fatalities, in a school that only opened a month ago. Now, the SAR phase has ended with a tally of 132 rescued. As always, it's difficult to say exactly the contribution of MapAction to this number but it's fair to say that we've been intimately involved, perhaps even more than usual.
With the data assembled by MapAction Support Base and all of those involved in the Haiti mission, and with particular help from the NGO InSTEDD (who provided a sophisticated location search system), we have been able to put coordinates to the often rough, incomplete addresses sent in by the families of those trapped who have managed to send desperate messages out. Without these, the SAR teams have had to search blindly and time is very much against those buried.
Each report is based on information provided by Nigel Woof - Chief Executive of MapAction
Darren Connaghan has been working with MapAction for several years and Argyll are very pleased to support his continued involvement. MapAction is a UK charity dedicated to humanitarian relief during disasters. When calamity strikes a region, a MapAction team arrives quickly at the scene and creates a stream of unique maps that depict the situation as the crisis unfolds. Aid agencies rely on these maps to coordinate the relief effort.
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