Hi Robert,
In the early days after Typhoon Haiyan, there were estimations of 10,000
dead, severe damages and no communications with various remote areas. The
humanitarian community as a whole needed even rough estimates of the extent
and the
distribution of the damages.
The Coordination group where OCHA , US Red Cross and HOT participated right
from the beginning of this intervention thought that OpenStreetMap should
contribute to make Damage assesments. The objective was to make these
assesments from Satellite imagery as soon as these would be available.
The Red Cross study makes the assumption that the objective of the
OpenStreetMap crowdsourcing was to make detailed assesments. But you can only
make rough assesments from Satellite imagery especially when atmospheric
conditions restrict the quality of the images provided. And a simple
classification was used (ie. damaged or destroyed). UAV's (drones) or Aerial
oblique imageries could have been used to make detailed assesments. But this
was not part of the established workflow of the humanitarian community before
Haiyan and such images were not available to make detailed assesments.
Once such crisis are ended, we should surely analyze our actions and plan
collectively for better interventions in the future. But we should avoid to
have wrong conclusions about actions taken during this crisis.
The way the report is written, it gives the impression that imprecision in
evaluation of assesment is due to the use of the OpenStreetMap community. The
humanitarian community as a whole did not build before this event the capacity
to react rapidly, deploy teams and provide detailed post-disaster imagery in
other ways then through Satellite.
In the context of this emergency and with the imagery provided, would
professionnals
specialized in damage assesment have scored significantly better? Due to the
limits of such assesments in the operational context of this operation,
analysis should be based on the capacity to identify zones of high damages and
not focus on individual houses. To my point of view, the objective of that
operation following the severed damages after Typhoon Haiyan was to give an
early warning to identify zones and not individual houses. This would need
oblique imagery.
Thinking about a better workflow in the context of such disasters, the
capacity to have more flexibility and deploy rapidly teams when necessary to
obtain either UAV imagery (drone) or aerial
oblique imagery would surely give a different response, this either with the
OpenStreetMap community or professionnals of damage assesment.
We surely have a workflow to build and establish the role and
limits of assesments done with aerial imagery in the context of such emergency
operations.
We should be careful to make the appropriate analysis and not demotivate
the OpenStreetMap community who made such a huge effort for this
activation.
The Red Cross study points to the fact that in most cases the limitation in
damage assesment was the imagery
that seemed to show undamaged buildings when in reality they had
sustained damage. But this is not reflected in the Executive summary and in
the Conclusion of the study. This study should be completed with a better
analysis of the type of imagery necessary to make better asssesment studies.
Pierre
________________________________
De : "Banick, Robert" <[email protected]>
À : "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Cc : Clay impact <[email protected]>; "Kunce, Dale"
<[email protected]>
Envoyé le : Mercredi 12 février 2014 9h22
Objet : [HOT] Interim Report: Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) Damage Assessment
Dear HOT Communuity,
The American Red Cross and the REACH Initiative are pleased to present an
interim assessment report on the validity of the building damages assessed
through OpenStreetMap in the weeks following Typhoon Haiyan. You can find a
print copy attached and a more interactive website version at the above link.
The results were unfortunately negative and underline real limitations in
OpenStreetMap’s ability to capture these results in the present. Neverthless,
this report identifies strong promise in the OSM model of crowdsourcing and
highlights the investments needed to make that potential possible. It’s our
sincere hope that funders, NGO partners and most especially the OpenStreetMap
community will rally around these investments so that OSM can play an even
stronger and more operationally useful role in future disaster responses.
We are indebted to the US Agency for International Development’s Office of
Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) for funding this assessment and look forward
to future partnerships to improve the utility of open data and OpenStreetMap in
particular for disaster response.
With all the best,
Robert Banick, Dale Kunce and Clay Westrope
American Red Cross & REACH Initiative
Robert Banick | Field GIS Coordinator | International Services | Ì American Red
Cross
2025 E Street NW, Washington, DC 20006\
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