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Lesson 9: Case Study - 2008 Sichuan Earthquake

Lesson 9 Overview

The New York Times worked quickly to develop a simple interactive map [1] showing key observations from the Sichuan Earthquake.

This week, we will learn about how GIS was used to respond and recover from the 5.12.2008 Sichuan Earthquake in China. This disaster was massive enough to require a large-scale response from people around the world. The geography of the affected area made it very difficult to reach victims and assess damage - posing a variety of challenges to GIS analysts that we will explore this week.

Objectives

At the successful completion of Lesson 9, students should be able to:

  • identify and critique the ways in which GIS was used to respond and recover from the 5.12.08 Sichuan Earthquake;
  • explain the complexity associated with disasters so large that they require international cooperation;
  • work on revising the final draft of your term project;
  • describe and discuss the use of Cloud and Server GIS in emergency management situations.

Questions?

If you have questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them on the Lesson 9 Questions and Comments Discussion in Canvas.

Checklist

Lesson 9 is one week in length. Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates. To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below. You may find it useful to print this page out first so that you can follow along with the directions.

Steps for Completing Lesson 9

Step Activity Access/Directions
1 Work through Lesson 9. You are in the Lesson 9 online content now. The Overview page is previous to this page, and you are on the Checklist page right now.
2 Complete the Lesson 9 Reading Assignment. On Page 5, you will find this week's Reading Assignment. You will need to post a response to the prompt I include about the slideshow I've asked you to review.
3 Read and Respond to the Emerging Theme topic for Lesson 9. You can find this week's Emerging Theme topic on Page 6. Review the materials there and participate in discussion as directed.
4 Complete the Lesson 9 Research Assignment. Page 7 has instructions for completing a short research assignment. You will find and post graphics and other media related to the Sichuan Earthquake.
5 Continue revising your Term Project. On Page 8, I encourage you to continue revising your Term Project.

 

May 12, 2008

2008 Sichuan Earthquake

On May 12, 2008 at 2:28pm, a 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck in Sichuan province, China. It killed over 70,000, injured over 375,000 and left almost 5 million people without shelter.

The quake was strong enough to be felt in many neighboring countries. Over 100 serious aftershocks occurred in the days and weeks after the initial disaster, collapsing damaged buildings and other infrastructure.

The earthquake occurred in a part of China that includes significant rivers and mountainous areas. Much of the worst damage occurred in mountain towns that were subsequently cut off from the rest of the country when roads were destroyed in landslides. This made it extremely difficult to locate people in need and deliver food and medical assistance.

Map of earthquake epicenter
Map of the epicenter of the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake.
USGS.
Survivor in Sichuan province
A survivor in Sichuan province.
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images.

Putting Yourself There

If you wish, you can listen to what the earthquake sounded like from this piece by NPR reporter Melissa Block, who was in Sichuan province along with other NPR reporters working on a story when the earthquake occurred. Block was interviewing someone for a story when the earthquake struck. Here is the audio from that moment (click the first link on the left side under the heading "A Quake's Arrival"):

NPR Sichuan Earthquake Story [2]

  • Click here for a video report by the New York Times created on May 14, 2008 [3].
  • Read this excellent liveblog [4] to get a sense of what outsiders knew from minute to minute as people tried to understand what had happened.

 

Using GIS to Respond and Recover

Quake Lakes

The Sichuan earthquake caused huge landslides across the affected region. Some of these landslides fell into riverbeds and dammed the water - forming what are called "quake lakes." Quake lakes are extremely dangerous for two reasons: first, because the lake they create behind the landslide will severely flood nearby cities and farmland, and secondly because the landslide dam will usually fail after damming up a large amount of water, sending a huge wave of water downstream that will destroy anything in its path.

A quake lake in China
A quake lake formed at Tangjiashan in Sichuan Province, China.
From China.org.cn.

GIS was particularly important for identifying, mapping, and planning response strategies for quake lakes. The most common use of GIS for the quake lake problem was to combine imagery analysis with flood and water flow modeling.

Quake lake damage
A NASA Earth Observatory image [5] collected from FORMOSAT showing quake lake damage.

GIS Resources

In the wake of the disaster the GIS community responded with dozens of datasets and mashups [6]. Harvard's Center for Geographic Analysis [7] set up the China Earthquake Geospatial Research Portal [8], which collects GIS data and relevant newsfeeds and provides a web mapping service to display data from the Sichuan quake. I recommend you explore their site to see what is available. The mission of their site is simple - to widely disseminate geographic data related to the quake for research and relief purposes.

International cooperation like this can be extremely helpful. Many serious disasters make it difficult or impossible for local governments to assemble data and make even the simplest types of maps for response and recovery efforts. Outside observers who volunteer their time and data are capable of making a significant impact.

In September, 2008, GeoVISTA Center [9] researchers went to China to attend a workshop on GeoCollaborative Crisis Management. We heard from several Chinese research scientists who told us how important it was to have outside help in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. As an example, the Chinese stated that their own remote sensing satellites did not provide adequate resolution or quick/complete coverage of the affected area, so it was essential to coordinate with other governments like the US and France to acquire high quality imagery in a very short timeframe.

One presenter at this conference told us about the frustration he and other GIS experts had with organizational barriers that prevented fast and efficient data sharing. Many of his colleagues were ashamed that on his way to the disaster area, China's president Wen Jiabao was only able to use an off-the-shelf paper map of the Sichuan region to begin planning response and recovery efforts.

Chinese President Wen Jiabao uses a standard paper reference map on the airplane ride to the disaster area.
Source: Xinhua News.

Reading Assignment

This week, I'd like you to read and discuss a few reports and slideshows that describe the earthquake and how GIS was used to respond and recover from its impacts.

  1. READ: Kirby E,  Whipple K,Harkins N (2008) Topography reveals seismic hazard. [10] Nature Geoscience 1(8): 485.

    This paper describes how topography and knowledge of geomorphological processes can reveal areas of seismic activity.

    THINK ABOUT

    What are ways that this type of analysis could be integrated into the process of emergency management hazard assessment using GIS? How would you ensure that the results of this sort of analysis would be understandable and actionable by non-experts in the community?

  2. READ: Brown, D., Saito, K., Liu, M., Spence, R., So, E., Ramage, M. (2012) The use of remotely sensed data and ground survey tools to assess damage and monitor early recovery following the 12.5.2008 Wenchuan earthquake in China [11]. Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering. 10:741-764.

    This is a summary of what a group of scientists observed from two field studies of ongoing recovery efforts in the impacted region. This group collected and leveraged a range of remote sensing data and other sources in order to map recovery efforts (and their progress) in the wake of the disaster.

  3. READ: Rapid Assessment of Earthquake Damage [12] (you may need to use Internet Explorer to view this slideshow, sorry! It works OK for me in Firefox but I can't guarantee it'll do the same for you) prepared by the China Data Center [13] at the University of Michigan.

    This slideshow was prepared shortly after the disaster to estimate the impact the earthquake had on people and infrastructure. It is valuable to see what people 7000 miles away in the United States were able to estimate given existing datasets and GIS tools. The relevant info is provided in both Chinese and English, so don't be afraid when you first see it that it won't make any sense to you - the maps are really the main feature here that I want you to spend some time examining.

    RESPOND

    How easy do you think it is to take output from current GIS tools and quickly condense it in a format like this slideshow so that decision makers and other outsiders could be brought up to speed about a disaster situation? What would you add to GIS tools to make this task more efficient? How likely is it that decision makers and other interested parties can readily make use of what they see on maps shared in this manner?

    This presentation was developed several years ago now - what do you notice that's changed substantially in terms of mapping technology (and analytical expectations) since 2008?

 

Emerging Theme: Cloud GIS for Emergency Management

GIS in the Cloud

There's still a ton of buzz today about Cloud computing. Cloud computing advances the state of the art in client-server systems by making the server side much more flexible on demand. In the old days, you would need to set up and maintain your own server hardware (or pay someone else to do this), and scaling to meet demand was only achieved by buying and installing new hardware or other manual processes that took some time to complete. Cloud architectures allow scalability to be more or less on demand, and servers can be replicated virtually in seconds. So if you're running a web mapping environment that experiences a sudden and sustained peak in demand, you can meet this demand flexibly (even automatically if you set things up that way).

If this topic interests you, you may want to check out our course in Cloud and Server GIS [14] where you can learn how to leverage and deploy GIS on the Cloud.

Cloud computing services that are available for flexible server scaling include: Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2 [15]), Google App Engine [16], Microsoft Azure [17], and Hadoop [18], which is an open source framework for cloud computing.

Cloud GIS for Emergency Management

FEMA's cloud GIS efforts include the FEMA Geoplatform [19], hosted on ArcGIS Online.

FEMA is currently operating an Emergency Management-focused collection hosted on the ArcGIS Online cloud, called the FEMA Geoplatform [19]. By its name, you can also see the connection to the U.S. Federal Geoplatform [20], the origins of which are described here in a short video by Jerry Johnston from the Department of the Interior. One of the key motivating factors to begin this effort was the effort to respond to the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

So what attributes of Cloud Computing are relevant for GIS in Emergency Management? Here are a few things that make this technology worth serious consideration in this context:

  1. Decentralized data hosting (cloud resources can be spread across data centers around the country or world)
  2. Scalable services (peaks in demand can be easily handled, sudden decreases in demand won't result in wasted headroom)
  3. Reduced maintenance effort (cloud vendor maintains the server side, freeing up the emergency management organization to focus everything on delivering products to decision-makers)

This is not to say that Cloud solutions are universally better choices for emergency management contexts. Having a private company host sensitive datasets can be very problematic (or impossible) in some situations. Relying on an outside supplier for server uptime and maintenance can work well much of the time, but if they experience a failure, it would be impossible for a local organization to take charge and maintain things themselves.

Deliverables for this week's emerging theme

  • Post a comment that describes how Cloud GIS attributes may impact the design of systems to support Emergency Management.
  • Then, I'd like you to offer additional insight, critique, a counter-example, or something else constructive in response to one of your colleagues' posts.
  • Brownie points for linking to other technology demos, pictures, blog posts, etc... that you've found to enrich your posts so that we may all benefit.

Research Assignment

Since I want you to focus most of your attention on finishing up your final project, I've made this week's assignment fairly simple:

I'd like each of you to hunt down at least two maps or information graphics created to support Earthquake Response or Recovery that you think are particularly useful examples of the application of GIS or geographic analysis. You can choose any recent Earthquake event to focus on for this assignment. One goal for you might be to highlight what is possible today compared to just a short time ago when the Sichuan Earthquake occurred.

Then, post what you find in the Lesson 9 Research Assignment discussion in Canvas along with source information (a link is fine). For each example, provide your name and a concise, one-sentence explanation of the content. These examples can be interactive tools, mashups, etc... as well as static graphics - just post a screen capture if what you find is not a static graphic.

There are dozens of possible examples, so if someone has already posted one that you wanted to post, keep looking! The goal here is to develop a nice collection that reflects the many ways in which people represented and analyzed the impact and aftermath of recent earthquakes.

Term Project - Continue Working on Final Version

Term Project - Continue Working on Final Version

At this point, you should be well on your way toward finishing your final term project paper. If you have already finished, consider having a colleague at work (or someone else you know who understands GIS) read your final draft and offer feedback. This is a great way to check for spelling and grammatical errors, and it's also a great way to find out how well you are communicating your ideas.

As always, if you run into trouble and need some help, please e-mail me.

If I were you, I'd also have a look ahead at the video presentation component of the final project, which you may want to begin preparing now. It's due during Lesson 10.

 

Summary

This week, we have explored the 5.12.2008 Sichuan Earthquake and the many ways in which GIS was used to respond and recover from this disaster. The magnitude of the disaster means that for the next several years GIS will continue to have a role in the long-term recovery of the region, and we can already see in subsequent disasters (like Haiti in 2010) that the expectations for GIS outputs continue to evolve at a rapid pace.

Next, we will begin the final lesson for this course. We will devote our attention to the term projects you have been working on throughout the semester. You will submit your final term project assignment materials and participate in a mini-conference to share your findings with your classmates.

Tell us about it!

If there is anything in the lesson materials that you would like to comment on or add to, feel free to post your thoughts to the Lesson 9 Questions and Comments Discussion in Canvas.  For example, what did you have the most trouble with in this lesson? Was there anything useful here that you'd like to try in your own work?

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Source URL: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/l10.html

Links
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/05/12/world/05132008_CHINA_MAP.html?_r=0
[2] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90366623
[3] http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/05/14/world/1194817477949/entering-the-epicenter.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
[4] http://shanghaiist.com/2008/05/12/earthquake-hits-wenchuan-sichuan.php
[5] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=19949
[6] http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/05/imagery-for-sichuan-china-earthquake.html
[7] http://www.gis.harvard.edu/
[8] http://cegrp.cga.harvard.edu/
[9] http://www.geovista.psu.edu
[10] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog588/files/file/ngeo265.pdf
[11] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog588/files/file/Brown_etal_2012.pdf
[12] http://www.iseis.cuhk.edu.hk/gb/special/earthquake_chi_files/frame.htm
[13] http://chinadatacenter.org/default.aspx
[14] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog865/
[15] http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/global-solution-providers/esri/
[16] https://cloud.google.com/products/app-engine
[17] http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/
[18] http://hadoop.apache.org/
[19] http://fema.maps.arcgis.com/home/
[20] http://geoplatform.gov