GEOG 588
Planning GIS for Emergency Management

Group 1: 2015 Nepal Earthquake Response - Paul and Kevin

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Response: April 2015 Earthquake, Nepal

The April 2015 Nepal earthquake, which had a magnitude of 7.8M, occurred at 1156 hrs Nepal Standard Time on 25 APR 15. The epicenter of the earthquake was in the vicinity of Barpak in the Nepalese District of Gorkha, approximately 34KM from Lamjung, Nepal. High magnitude aftershocks, also described as other major earthquakes, associated with the 25 APR 15 earthquake, continued through 12 MAY 15. Estimates of earthquake related deaths and injuries in Nepal vary widely from 430 killed and 753 wounded to 8,800 killed and between16,000 and 23,000 wounded. An estimated 2.8 million people were reportedly displaced due to effects of the earthquake. Death and injuries associated with the earthquake were also reported in India, China, and Bangladesh.

Clipped from: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mapping-nepal-after-the-earthquake 

The earthquake resulted in significant damage to or collapse of private, business, and government infrastructure, with some estimates indicating 40% of Nepal was impacted by the earthquake. Early estimates of the overall damage were between USD 10 and 15 billion. Earthquake damage included:

  • Damage to Tribhuvan International Airport and disruption of water, sewage, and electricity, runway damage limiting the size / weight on planes accessing the airport
  • Damage to historic buildings including temples on Kathmandu Dugar Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site
  • Destruction or significant damage to rural roads including debris blockages from collapsed building and landslides, limited damage to major highways and bridges
  • Disruption of the planting cycle
  • The destruction of approximately 505,000 homes, damage to more than 279,000 homes
  • Damage to 14 hydropower projects resulting in the loss of 150 MW of electricity from Nepal’s grid

Natural disaster related to the earthquake including landslides and avalanches also impacted infrastructure and people, especially rural infrastructure and people located in less accessible mountainous terrain.

Satellite footage of the nine-storey, 61.88-metre-tall tower at Sundhara in Kathmandu, before and after the earthquake. Credit: DigitalGlobe. Clipped from: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mapping-nepal-after-the-earthquake 

Key Stakeholders in the recovery phase of the earthquake include people and organizations. Stakeholders can be roughly divided into “Directly Impacted”, “Indirectly Impacted”, “Responding (not impacted), and “Impacted and Responding” categories.

  • Directly Impacted
    • Description – People or organizations, generally in the most impacted geography whose access to basic infrastructure (food and water, shelter, medical support) is cut off or significantly limited. Due to direct impacts, Directly Impacted parties have extremely limited self-preservation and protection options.
    • Needs – Basic immediate aid such as food, emergency medical response, temporary shelter and possible evacuation.
    • Examples – Small businesses and local government offices and facilities, residents, homeowners, tourists, previously displaced / homeless persons.
  • Indirectly Impacted
    • Description – People or organizations, generally located in a somewhat impacted geography, whose access to basic infrastructure is limited but not cut off. Indirectly Impacted parties have somewhat limited self-preservation and protection options.
    • Needs – Some basic immediate support to prevent decline or exhaustion of current sustainment resources.
    • Examples - Small businesses and local government offices and facilities, residents, homeowners.
  • Responding (not impacted)
    • Description – People or organizations, generally locates outside of impacted geography, who intend to provide material or financial support to Directly and Indirectly Impacted persons and organizations.
    • Needs – Information, logistics support, direction and coordination.
    • Examples – International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Charitable Response and Donations Organizations, United Nations
  • Impacted and Responding
    • Description – Directly or Indirectly Impacted people or organizations who are can, do, or are required to play a response role.
    • Needs – A mix of the needs of all other types of stakeholders. Particular emphasis on sustainment
    • Examples – Local, District, and National Level First Responders, Local Health Clinics, Local and District Government Offices and personnel.

Geographic information proved to be critical in the Gorkha quake and its aftermath, especially in the response phase, where lives hung in the balance due to inadequate transportation and building footprint maps.  Fortunately, geospatial resources from around the globe, from satellite imaging to GPS-equiped cell phones, from expert imagery interpreters to volunteer mappers, kicked into action almost immediately.   The global effort was led by the local organization, Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL), a community of volunteers formed in 2012 to creat a central repository for geo-located needs data to be used for relief efforts.  KLL coordinated with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOTOSM)Mapbox BangaloreNepal Monitor and Parewa Labs, to unite 2,182 mappers from around the world to contribute to the OpenStreetMap platform,  performing 58,250 edits to highways and 91,850 edits to buildings taken from over 14,700 km2 worth of high resolution satellite imagery.

  

OSM Contributors at Kathmandu Living Labs operational one day after the earthquake. They support the government and international organizations from Kathmandu while the global OSM community rapidly improve the map from afar

Learning from previous experience during earthquakes in Haiti (date) and Indonesia (date), the HOTOSM mappers used a validation system to reduce error, with every edit passing before at least 1 other mapper, before being reviewed by more expert map editors.  Local volunteers, some equiped with drones, were also employed to ground truth the OSM data.  Where earlier crowdsource mapping responses had foundered trying to get the product of these efforts into the hands of those organizations who need them, the Nepal effort benefited from a strong prior relationship between KLL and the Red Cross.

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Poised for action: Aeryon's sUAVs were instrumental to mapping regions of devastation to help GlobalMedic relief workers. (GlobalMedic)  Clipped from: http://spie.org/newsroom/052115-nepal-quake?SSO=1

The KLL and HOTOSM efforts were supplemented by social media information that they collected from Facebook posts and Tweets and organised into a quake map. This was then shared with relief groups and the Nepal Army.  About 40% of Nepalese are online, and that primarily in urban centers, but it was found that people in remote areas were texting friends and family in the cities for them to post online their pleas for relief and news of missing loved ones, and despite traffic-laden networks, social media exploded with valuable information.  These resources were used by social media groups like the Rapid Response Team and Sankalpa to convert Facebook posts, Tweets, and SMS text messages into relief maps.

Social media crowdsourcing also factored into the use of satellite imagery.  The Digital Globe company deployed their Tomnod crowdsourcing platform, which allows volunteers to pour over thousands of square kilometers of imagery, comparing and tagging imagery with damaged structures and infrastructure.  The crowdsourced imagery is then run through an alborithm that identifies frequently tagged agreements to identify areas most in need.  Both Digital Globe and the joint United Nations and European Commission initiative, UN satellite imagery program, UNOSAT, tasked their Synthetic Aperture Radar and hyperspectral, high resolution satellites to start mapping the region, and much of the data was made available in UNOSAT's Live Web Map.  UNOSAT has also developed a smartphone app that uploads photos from volunteers directly to their web map, which was deployed to volunteers on the ground in Nepal to geospatially document damage.

Our team has developed the following response phase analytic product, taking crowdsourced landslide map data, buffering it to 1 mile to simulate larger population effects, and clipping a population density raster to the extent of the landslide zones.  A color ramp is applied to indicate the concentrations of populations who are likely to be effected by landslides, and may require evacuation.  Furthermore, transportation layers are added to help plan evacuations, first a layer of major roadways not effected by the landslides, and then sections of major roadways that are suspected to be damaged by the landslides, including bridges, tunnels, causeways, and ferry/ford crossings.  This gives an indication of where the most vulnerable populations are, as well as the most likely roadways available for evacuation efforts.

Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2015_Nepal_earthquake

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nepal-earthquake-of-2015

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-32479909

https://www.mercycorps.org/articles/nepal/quick-facts-what-you-need-know-about-nepal-earthquake

https://www.usaid.gov/nepal-earthquake/fy15/fs01

http://sites.dartmouth.edu/NepalQuake-CaseStudies/engineering-infrastructure-design/

https://qz.com/409484/the-economic-damage-from-the-nepal-earthquake-is-almost-half-of-the-countrys-gdp/

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/5/3/nepal-earthquake.html

http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/546211467998818313/pdf/97501-WP-PUBLIC-Box391481B-nepal-post-disaster-needs-assement-report-PUBLIC.pdf

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mapping-nepal-after-the-earthquake 

http://spie.org/newsroom/052115-nepal-quake?SSO=1

https://qz.com/406562/how-social-media-is-helping-nepal-rebuild-after-two-big-earthquakes-2/