Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes

Jesse Robbins had to get across U.S. Route 90 quickly. Hurricane Katrina had wrecked the Gulf Coast, and Robbins, an emergency medical technician, was on a mission, delivering temporary secure shelters for emergency supplies. American Red Cross workers guided him using Google mapping tools in areas where street signs had been washed away.

He hit a dead end. The passage had been destroyed by the storm. His route was based on dated imagery, not a live satellite feed.

“Frequently, you’d be working with them and they’d give you directions over closed streets or places that didn’t exist any longer,” Robbins said of the Red Cross workers relying on Google’s maps.

Emergency responders encounter this problem constantly when disasters strike. It also explains what drives the companies building mapping tools designed to help people navigate the aftermath of floods, earthquakes, and other catastrophes.

Collaborative Mapping

GeoCommons runs a site where users can explore a large atlas of maps with various data and add their own information. “The advent of user-contributed data allows nontechnical people to publish their own maps,” says Sean Gorman, CEO and founder of FortiusOne, which runs GeoCommons. After devastating flooding in the Midwest in May 2008, people created their own maps of bridge closures, flood zone outlines, and Home Depot locations where people could get supplies. The maps were made available to anyone.

OpenStreetMap is a freely available map that lets anyone with knowledge of a place contribute from anywhere. Mikel Maron saw the potential for collaborative mapping in disasters and brought the idea to the U.N. Joint Logistics Center group responsible for making maps for first responders. The U.N. started testing the approach.

Art vs. Practice

Other mapping tools place limits on who can make updates. “We may not want to rely on the crowd for data in an emergency, so there are tweaks to the model possible,” Maron said during a presentation about disaster tech at a conference in Burlingame, California. “A smaller crowd of people who have some measure of responsibility in a situation should be able to pass along information.” After Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar, the UNJLC used maps that collected information about flooding and the state of critical transportation and health infrastructure, asking the community to email updates about roads, bridges, ports, and waterways.

Robbins’ work in Louisiana after Katrina showed him firsthand that some tools don’t work nearly as well on the ground as they do in a lab.

“One of the interesting things with being a pretty senior technology person operating in a disaster is that you get to see the state of the art versus the state of the practice.” He’s hoping that with each disaster, he sees less of a difference between the two.