ASM
Sichuan Shows Value of Spatial
The earthquake that struck Sichuan province in May, resulting in an official death toll of 69,195, is by no means the worst natural disaster to ever afflict the Chinese people. However, it is possibly the largest since the Chinese have had access to modern information and communications technology.
That it made a difference is indisputable. Large numbers of people and resources were mobilised within days – some within hours. According to Wenjie Wang from Intergraph China, staff from Wuhan University had a ZI Digital Mapping Camera over the region on the first day. Rescue teams performed heroic feats to uncover people buried in their homes or trapped by rubble.
But in trying to build an understanding of what went right and wrong, it is easy to be deceived by the significance of this early response. Spectacular rescues – the family airlifted from a roof, the grandmother who survived days trapped in the ruins of her home – make great television. But the real stories are not found on TV.
These stories are about the thousands of people who did not die from lack of food because someone, somewhere, knew where the people were and where the food was. Someone knew where the doctors were, what supplies they would need and how to get from one to the other.
Much of the data for the earthquake response was organised by the National Geomatics Centre of China. It used its 1:50,000 datasets as the base map for many of the special data products that flowed from the centre during the event.
NGCC sourced satellite imagery from Spot, TM, Quickbird,GeoEye, JAXA, ISRO and Chinese sources.
Frank Bignone, who heads the Asian operations of Infoterra France, said that by using data from its Terrasar-X radar satellite, rescue authorities were able to find places where landslides had cut roads. This allowed them to identify the most effective way of reaching survivors.
This is how lives were saved. And the key ingredient in all this was spatial technology.
Francis Ho, the chief executive of ESRI China, said his company worked with government agencies on a number of different projects in the days and weeks following the earthquake.
ESRI provided software and technical support for many of its existing users. For instance, it set up a system using ArcServer that helped the China Centre for Disease Control use mobile devices to map medical requirements. 'We worked night and day,’ Ho said. 'The system was established in just 35 hours.’
ESRI also established a partnership with suppliers of hardware and data to provide turn-key systems for users. Ho says that about 450 people volunteered for the project.
But as the dust settles on the earthquake, authorities in China are looking at the lessons that might be learned from the way spatial information was applied. Li Deren from Wuhan University and one of the masterminds behind the use of spatial information in the earthquake response, urged the creation of a new body to organise rapid response to natural disasters.
In a plenary session at the 21st ISPRS, he said that China should look to the sharing and interoperability of datasets through a spatial data infrastructure. He also said the Earth imaging system in China should be strengthened.
It seems that one of the most valuable lessons to come out of Sichuan is the importance of sharing data. Historically, Chinese bureaucrats have treated data as a valuable resource for the agency that created it. They have not been able to see any reason to share it. Sichuan has reinforced the lesson that data has great value for the whole of society.
