gabrielle_iglesias's Xanga

Crisis mapping brings X-ray style clarity to humanitarian response

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:03:41 GMT

12 Oct 2009 14:47:00 GMT

by: Astrid Zweynert

downloaded from: http://www.alertnet.org/db/an_art/57939/2009/09/12-144735-1.htm

LONDON (AlertNet) - In the chaos that usually follows a natural disaster, taking the time to create maps may seem low down on the priority list when a rapid response is key to helping to save lives.
But mapping and the humanitarian response meet when important questions are asked in the aftermath of a disaster, such as: "Where are the affected populations? Where can they be evacuated to? Where is it safe and where is the aid?"
"Crisis mapping is to the humanitarian space what x-rays are to public health," said Patrick Meier, who along with Jen Ziemke founded the International Network of Crisis Mappers (INCM).
It helps us to understand at a micro level the behaviour we see in humanitarian emergencies," Meier told AlertNet in an interview.
Meier and Ziemke have joined forces to organise the first international conference on crisis mapping, to be held this week at John Carroll University in the United States.
Maps, aerial photography and satellite imagery already provide powerful tools for aid agencies to assess the scale of disasters and to keep tabs on the movement of affected people and supplies sent to help them.
Meier said a new approach to crisis mapping has evolved over the past five years with the aim of making the process more collaborative and more immediate.
A new generation of Web sites that allow users to exchange data and information and help create quasi real-time maps through mobile phone technology will be the way forward in crisis mapping, Meier said, just like Twitter and Facebook have become the standard in social networking over the past few years.

COLLABORATION IS KEY
This approach will allow a wider variety of actors to join forces in an emergency - such as survivors, donors, aid agencies and local media - to get their information onto maps in real time and distribute them rapidly among crises responders and beneficiaries.
"It is the view from below that we need," said Meier, adding crisis mapping could also make a difference to people-centred early warning systems by enabling local populations to share knowledge about their situation through maps.
Map-sharing portals such as Google Earth and open-source platforms, like Ushahidi, created to help collect witness reports of violence after the disputed 2008 elections in Kenya, have been at the forefront of innovative efforts to visualise conflicts.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google broke new ground in 2007 with their "Crisis in Darfur" package of electronic maps and other data, utilising high-resolution satellite imagery to display graphic evidence of human rights violations in Darfur.
Conference co-organiser Ziemke used crisis maps and econometric techniques to help identify patterns of civil war abuse in Angola. After coding and geo-referencing 41 years of conflict data in that country, she powerfully demonstrated how losses on the battlefield escalate patterns of violence against civilians.

HOW MAPS CAN HELP SAVE LIVES
On the ground, MapAction, a small British-based NGO that provides mapping and other geospatial information following natural disasters, is a veteran in using maps to help emergency responders.
One of its teams arrived in Sumatra three days after a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck the city of Padang and its surrounding areas last month, and offers to contribute data to its maps came in rapidly.
"There have been many offers of data and requests for maps. I have not experienced this much frantic activity since the Kashmir earthquake in 2005," said team leader Nigel Woof.
n the Philippines, where the worst floods in 40 years have wreaked havoc, MapAction has created maps with the help of OpenStreetMap, a free Wikipedia-style map.
Meier hopes the Crisis Mapping 2009 conference this week in Cleveland, Ohio, which brings together mapping experts, software developers and humanitarian crises responders from around the world, will go a long way in helping to create effective real-time tracking systems.
Technology is no barrier any more to this," said Meier. "It's a matter of integrating the different aspects and updating in quasi real-time so that anyone in a 100-mile radius of a disaster can be reached."
The "Humanitarian Sensor Web" (HSW), a tool which allows community leaders and crisis responders to coordinate their efforts in emergency humanitarian situations, will be shown publicly for the first time at the Oct. 16-18 conference, which is co-organised by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and John Carroll University.
The HSW also aims to serve as a source of collective intelligence, with a map-based database of places and events that will help those who are responding to a current crisis or planning for future security or humanitarian relief, Meier said.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation will later this year launch its Emergency Information Service (EIS) which deploys in emergencies to help those affected by natural disasters get the information they need to survive and recover.
The EIS will also be based on a collaborative platform that will allow users to share information.
Researchers have used maps to visualise crises for many years.
But there are drawbacks in the the use of highly-sophisticated, computerised Geographical Information Systems (GIS), which are usually used in such work -- not least that they are expensive and difficult to operate.
Nor do these systems allow for much integration and collaboration, and due to their complexities they are not usually updated in real time.

Dagupan bags national award on disaster preparedness

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 07:56:28 GMT

downloaded from: http://mail.pia.gov.ph/?m=12&fi=p090813.htm&no=17

Dagupan City (13 August) -- The city disaster coordinating council is the best nationwide among independent component cities in the annual Gawad Kalasag search.

The Gawad Kalasag award is bestowed annually in recognition of exemplary achievements by local governments, government agencies, the private sector and individuals in the field of disaster management.

Mayor Alipio Fernandez Jr. yesterday received the Plaque of Recognition and cash award from President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in formal ceremonies at the Heroes Hall in Malacañang.

"This recognition is the crowning achievement of our people's shared efforts to make Dagupan a community resilient to disasters," Fernandez said.

In March 2006, Dagupan became one of six Asian pilot cities for a community-based disaster risk management project dubbed as Program for Hydro-Meteorological Risk Mitigation for Secondary Cities in Asia (Project PROMISE).

Through the program, the CDCC aspired to make Dagupan more pro-active and prepared during disasters following its painful experience from the July 16, 1990 earthquake.

Since then, Dagupan strengthened and institutionalized disaster management and emergency response measures in all aspects of city life, including the establishment of the Emergency Operations Center, the Dagupan City Citizens' Helpline, year-round earthquake and fire drills, a multi-hazard trainings and workshops for barangay disaster coordinating councils, schools, banks, hotels and other business establishments.

Only last July 21, Dagupan scored 95 percent from at least thirty evaluators from the Regional Disaster Coordinating Council and member agencies during the simultaneous earthquake and fire drill sessions in three different sections of the city.

Dagupan has been sharing experiences with other local governments throughout the country, as well other Asian countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand.

In 2008, the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) dubbed Dagupan as a global model on disaster management. (CIO/PIA Pangasinan)

Information 'weakest link' in managing climate risk - report

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:01:07 GMT

17 Jun 2009 07:52:00 GMT

Written by: Megan Rowling
downloaded from: http://www.alertnet.org/db/an_art/20316/2009/05/17-075202-1.htm

Rani Begam's father lost four sisters and his first wife in a cyclone - a tragedy that inspired her to take part in a Red Cross project that gives villagers in southern Bangladesh information about what to do when storms and floods are approaching.
Each of the 85 cyclone shelters in the coastal area has a team of 12 female volunteers who teach other women first aid and how to stockpile supplies ahead of a potential weather disaster. Instead of a sari - which can get caught and cause drowning - women are advised to wear trousers and a tunic, and tie back their hair. They are also told about the different types of flags raised above shelters, which indicate how much time they have to evacuate their homes.
Women are often the worst affected when disasters strike. Where Rani lives, only men used to know about preparing for disasters but the Red Cross initiative has helped to persuade local religious leaders of the benefits of involving women too.
"Developing a good image for female volunteers has taken a long time," she explains in the 2009 World Disasters Report (WDR). "People now see that we are doing a good job to help others."
Far from U.N. climate change talks where international policy on global warming is made, Rani's experiences are an example how communities are dealing with climate risk at a grassroots level. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) says the world needs more community-based programmes if its poorest people are to be protected from the worst consequences of climate change.
"We are focusing on people and communities - after all, that is where disasters are felt," explains Maarten van Aalst, associate director of the Hague-based Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, in the report. "We are asking communities to think about how risks are changing, how this will affect them and what they need to do about it."
This year's WDR argues the risks of climate change need to be at the heart of decision-making on ways to prepare for the uncertain and unpredictable changes global warming is expected to bring. These include more frequent and severe floods, droughts, storms and heatwaves, and rising sea levels.
"Those future risks may be largely unknown, but by learning to incorporate climate risk into decision-making now, we are paving the way for development to continue and people to prosper, whatever the climate brings tomorrow," says the report.
"Climate risk management is essentially early action for climate change."
Climate change threatens to bring disaster in two key ways: through extreme events that will devastate vulnerable communities; and by compounding the already complex problems faced by poor countries whose populations are growing fast.
The report warns that climate change "could contribute to a downward development spiral for millions of people, even greater than has already been experienced".
AD HOC RESPONSE
It also says global warming offers us the "ultimate early warning" thanks to the huge amount of scientific evidence and projections on its impacts. "We know more about this impending 'disaster' than any other in history," the report notes. Yet the risks posed by climate change have only been addressed on "a piecemeal basis".
The IFRC recommends action on two levels - putting in place early warning systems, and reducing vulnerability over the longer term so communities can cope better with extreme weather.
Examples of widely practised climate risk management include farmers using weather forecasts to decide when to sow and fertilise their crops, and building homes away from flood plains. But even for these simple responses, people need information on weather and climate - described in the report as one of the "weakest links".
Even if information does get to those who need it most, it's often too technical to be of great help. In most poor countries, people don't have the resources to act on the information they do receive.
The report argues that these problems can be addressed quite easily. "All that is needed is commitment and funding," it says.
The solutions it recommends include providing more weather stations in developing countries, particularly African ones, and organising more regional climate outlook forums where experts offer seasonal forecasts.
Once reliable weather data is available for a location, it allows insurers to offer what's known as "index insurance" to farmers, businesses and even governments. This type of insurance pays out according to the weather itself - for example, rainfall - rather than its consequences like crop failure. In turn, it can help farmers get loans.
Pilot schemes are being tested in a number of developing countries. One of the earliest began in Malawi in 2005, and is combined with a loan scheme. Groundnut, maize and tobacco farmers have been able to improve their yields in good seasons by borrowing money to buy better seeds. Quent Mukhwimba says he's doubly pleased because "in case of severe drought, I do not have to worry about paying back loans in addition to looking for food to feed my family".
The report emphasises that climate change - while a huge and urgent challenge - is only one of several global trends threatening the stability of the planet, which include poverty, population growth and the degradation of ecosystems.

Watch me make a presentation on Gender and Disasters!

Thu, 14 May 2009 15:34:43 GMT

I had given a presentation for the World Bank during one of their conferences. I just found the webpage of the presentations and videos of the speakers.

http://www1.worldbank.org/hdnetwork/External/sp/socialfunds/bangkok/iglesias.htm

The video runs only on Internet Explorer.

This is the link to the conference's main page: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/EXTEAPREGTOPSOCDEV/0,,contentMDK:21580103~menuPK:502957~pagePK:64215727~piPK:64215696~theSitePK:502940,00.html.

cellphones, navigational maps and mental maps

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:55:23 GMT

downloaded from: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/17/science/17map.html

February 17, 2009

The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives

By JOHN MARKOFF

The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. The four billion cellphones in use around the globe carry personal information, provide access to the Web and are being used more and more to navigate the real world. And as cellphones change how we live, computer scientists say, they are also changing how we think about information.

It has been 25 years since the desktop, with its files and folders, was introduced as a way to think about what went on inside a personal computer. The World Wide Web brought other ways of imagining the flow of data. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map.

“The map underlies man’s ability to perceive,” said Richard Saul Wurman, a graphic designer who was a pioneer in the use of maps as a generalized way to search for information of all kinds before the emergence of the online world.

As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods. As researchers and businesses learn how to use all the information about a user’s location that phones can provide, new privacy issues will emerge. You may use your phone to find friends and restaurants, but somebody else may be using your phone to find you and find out about you.

Digital map displays on hand-held phones can now show the nearest gas station or A.T.M., reviews of nearby restaurants posted online by diners, or the location of friends. In the latest and biggest example of the map’s power and versatility, Google started a location-aware friend-finding system called Latitude in 27 countries early this month.

On its face, Google’s new service — available on dozens of mobile systems — is simply a way for friends to keep track of one another and meet up, for families to stay in touch or for parents to find comfort in knowing where their children are.

But it will generate a gold mine of new information about where millions of people travel each day, and there is no doubt that Google and others are planning to dig in that mine. “Everyone is watching Google, and this will open a floodgate of location-oriented applications and services,” said Greg Skibiski, the chief executive of Sense Networks, a New York City firm that mines the millions of digital trails left by cellphone users for marketing purposes.

It was the arrival of the so-called WIMP interface — for windows, icons, menus, pointer — in the 1980s on both the Apple Macintosh and computers using Microsoft Windows that made personal computers personal and moved them beyond the world of hobbyists and business. Now many of the software designers who created those interfaces say they see a change of similar magnitude with phones and maps.

“We’re way early on, and we don’t know what the Macintosh of maps will be yet,” said Paul Mercer, a former Apple Computer software designer who more recently worked on the development of the Palm Pre smartphone. “But because of their relationship to the real world, maps will be a metaphor for a huge swath of mobile computing.”

Indeed, a new generation of smartphones like the G1, with Android software developed by Google, and a range of Japanese phones now “augment” reality by painting a map over a phone-screen image of the user’s surroundings produced by the phone’s camera.

With this sort of map it is possible to see a three-dimensional view of one’s surroundings, including the annotated distance to objects that may be obscured by buildings in the foreground. For starters, map-based cellphones simply translate paper maps into a digital medium, but future systems will probably begin to blur the boundaries between the display and the real world.

“I always said the next interface would be Quake,” said Steve Capps, one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface, referring to the popular video game. “How long will it be before you come out of the subway and you hold up your screen to get a better view of what you’re looking at in the physical world?”

Increasingly, phones will allow users to look at an image of what is around them. You could be surrounded by skyscrapers but have an immediate reference map showing your destination and features of the landscape, along with your progress in real time. Part of what drives the emergence of map-based services is the vast marketing potential of analyzing consumers’ travel patterns. For example, it is now possible for marketers to identify users who are shopping for cars because they have traveled to multiple car dealerships.

“When I go from point A to point B with my feet, there is something of real value there,” said Tony Jebara, a Columbia University computer scientist who is a co-founder of Sense Networks.

A full-blown map-based, location-aware mobile world would entail rethinking basic American notions of privacy. For a generation of older Americans, exposing their precise location around the clock to an army of little brothers for marketing and advertising purposes is a privacy invasion.

Today the vast majority of cellphone users in the United States still use the devices primarily for just one function: talking. About 10 percent of cellphone users take advantage of map features, according to the market research firm M:Metrics. But the number is growing, the company said. And a survey by another market research firm, LJS, showed that 24 percent of those interviewed wanted GPS mapping capabilities on their next phone, but only 19 percent wanted an Internet connection.

On the other hand, there is a generation of smartphone users in their 20s that has grown up sharing the most intimate details of their lives on MySpace and Facebook. They may have a different point of view.

Recently, for example, Sam Altman, a 23-year-old Stanford University computer science graduate and the founder of Loopt, a pioneering friend-finding service, was having dinner in Palo Alto, Calif., when he noticed from the screen on his phone that his freshman college roommate was having dinner just two restaurants away. The two met after dinner at a bar, where they were joined by another former Stanford student who noticed on his display that they were socializing together.

Mr. Altman said his willingness to display his location was just as valuable in his business dealings. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, he turned on a feature that broadcasts his location and his name. He had more than a dozen business contacts as he traveled around the vast trade show, and he said he was able to kick off four deals from his random contacts.

The map interface even seems to have a biological basis, as suggested by new brain studies showing how the world is represented in brain maps.

“Humans evolved with amazing navigational abilities in our brains from an evolutionary perspective,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. He argues that the correlation between the map on the phone and the internal map in your head is a natural way to navigate all kinds of information.

For example, neuroscientists have discovered that people who have occupations that require them to maintain complex mental maps of the world, like London taxi drivers, have an enlarged hippocampus. What happens when our hand-held computers become extensions of the way we think?

“I have wondered about the fact that we might as a culture lose the skill of mapping our environment, relying on the Web to tell us how to navigate,” said Hugo Spiers, a neurobiologist at University College London. “Thus, it might reduce the growth of cells in the hippocampus, which we think stores our internal maps.”

Among cellphone makers, the map metaphor has been adopted most aggressively by Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones. The company has acquired digital maps of 69 countries and is now rushing to deliver to developers the tools to create software for Nokia phones oriented toward maps and navigation. In many ways this is similar to the tool kit that early computer designers gave programmers to develop Windows applications.

“This is a new metaphor upon which others can build,” said Michael Halbherr, Nokia’s vice president for social location services.

Why humanitarians and climate scientists don't talk

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 01:44:43 GMT

downloaded from: http://www.alertnet.org/db/an_art/20316/2009/00/30-171854-1.htm

Last May, the Red Cross office for West and Central Africa decided it wasn't going to let the flood disaster of 2007 happen again. The floods had affected over 800,000 people when torrential rains pummelled the region, destroying crops and homes.

Red Cross partner, the African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development, and other forecasters issued warnings for abnormally heavy rains during the 2008 wet season. Acting on their advice, the aid agency decided to issue an early appeal for funds to help countries prepare, including stocking up on relief supplies in major cities.

Yet such cases of collaboration remain relatively rare. At a recent seminar bringing climate scientists and aid workers together in London, organised by the Humanitarian Futures Programme, a research initiative based at King's College that helps aid agencies tackle major challenges to their work, participants agreed they didn't communicate enough.

"We don't really talk directly to humanitarian groups, although we do to some development groups," admitted Richard Jones, manager of regional predictions at the Met Office Hadley Centre.

Andy Morse of Liverpool University urged aid agencies to get more involved in international discussions. "The humanitarian community...needs better representation. You need to keep bashing away at the climate scientists," he said.

WRONG TIME, WRONG PLACE

One major problem is that scientists tend to focus on how the climate will change in 20 to 100 years' time, whereas humanitarian workers want nearer-term forecasts for their planning - ranging from this week's weather to the next wet or dry season, and up to around five years ahead.

Declan Conway, a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, said a study he'd worked on in Ethiopia, exploring how climate change would affect development projects, had got a disappointing reaction from donors probably because of its 2020-2050 time scale.

Fortunately, according to Liverpool University's Morse, this mismatch of time horizons should be fixed in the next few years as more money is made available to fund shorter-term forecasting.

But it's not just a matter of time. Another complaint from aid agencies is that forecasts aren't available on a small enough geographical scale to be useful in the field.

Mark New, a climate scientist at Oxford University, has produced a set of national climate data summaries for 52 developing countries, funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the British government. These outline changes in temperature and rainfall since the 1960s and give an overview of what may happen as far forward as 2090.

"I know these projections are too coarse a resolution (for humanitarians), and I don't recommend that they should be used for very local assessments," New noted.

INFORMATION NOT DATA

On the positive side, the country profiles do marshal complex sets of statistics and probabilities into a few pages of fairly comprehensible text. The need to turn more climate data into information that can be used by non-specialists was a recurring theme at the seminar.

"It's not that there aren't enough climate models being run," said the Hadley Centre's Jones. "But not enough work has been done to interpret the information that comes out of the climate models."

He also stressed the importance of understanding the reliability of data and the context in which it should be used.

Both sides agreed there was a need for a deeper understanding of exactly what kind of climate information matters to aid workers.

"The communities we work with need reliable predictions on specific conditions," explained Jose Luis Penya, a risk reduction and livelihoods officer with Christian Aid. "The attention span of the farmers is five years, 10 years - no more - and they are interested in shifting patterns of rain."

COME RAIN OR SHINE?

This highlights another difficulty with climate predictions - also clear from the Oxford/UNDP profiles - that forecasts for temperature changes are much more certain than those for precipitation. Information on rainfall often includes such wide variations as to be practically useless.

This is unlikely to improve any time soon, according to East Anglia University's Conway. "We have much lower confidence about precipitation," he said. "And it will be another five to 10 years before we can give information with confidence about how extreme events will change in the future."

Mike Edwards, climate change advisor at CAFOD, suggested the best course for aid agencies would be to improve their capacity to manage risk. "We would all love to have regional and local predictions that are certain, but they're not available and I don't think they will be in the near future on a scale we can use," he said.

Yvan Biot, climate change policy advisor to Britain's Department of International Development (DfID), asked whether a better understanding of existing resilience to disasters like flooding might be more useful for aid agencies than detailed information about future climate trends.

Analysing vulnerability to today's climate hazards could serve as a basis for developing "low-regrets" measures that would help communities adapt to climate change both now and in the longer-term, he argued.

Other practical suggestions to boost the use of climate science in aid work included:

Taking climate scientists into the field with humanitarian staff to introduce them to realities on the ground
Building a web bank where aid agencies can find reliable climate data
Creating a discussion forum so scientists can better understand aid agencies' information needs, including time scales and the most urgent geographical gaps
Using local and indigenous knowledge to build up records of climate patterns and collaborating with communities on gathering weather data
Finding low-tech ways to pass on climate information to local communities in a form they can understand and use
Applying climate science to verify local experiences of climate change and establish underlying trends
Compiling case studies to boost practical knowledge about the impacts of climate change and vulnerability to climate risk
Using existing institutions, such as farmer field schools and local media, to raise awareness and stimulate dialogue about climate change at community level
Promoting national and regional initiatives on climate change, such as the Climate Outlook Forum for the Horn of Africa

Yet amid all the enthusiasm for greater collaboration, aid agencies were also keen to remind their scientific colleagues that climate change is only one factor they must grapple with. And in the heat of an emergency it can slip down the agenda fast.

"We need to ask how important climate change is compared with other hazards like conflict," argued CAFOD's Edwards. "It's like going in to eastern Congo and Gaza and saying 'how about climate change?'".

Army Corps Responds as Water Tops Levees

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 04:44:56 GMT

downloaded from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/us/02corps.html?ex=1378094400&en=645913c590076d01&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

September 2, 2008

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

NEW ORLEANS — It took only minutes for the mood to turn from relaxed to grim.

Early Monday morning, the emergency operations team for the Army Corps of Engineers had been cheered by what appeared to be a dodged bullet: Hurricane Gustav had weakened significantly and did not seem to be packing the kind of storm surge that would overwhelm the city’s incomplete hurricane protection system.

But then, around midday, reports started coming in to the team’s emergency operations center that water was approaching the top of the western floodwalls on the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, long known as the most vulnerable part of the protection system. If those walls failed — as they had on the east side of the canal in Hurricane Katrina three years ago, destroying much of the city’s Lower Ninth Ward — disaster was a distinct possibility.

The news was received with no anger, no shouting. The team members worked with quiet determination, trying to figure out why the water was stacking up in the canal. When a member of the team asked Capt. Eric Marshall to attend to some bit of administrative trivia, he said curtly: “It’s too late for that stuff. We’re in tactical mode.”

Hurricane Gustav hit a very different protection system than Hurricane Katrina did. Three years ago, there were no gates to prevent water from Lake Pontchartrain from swamping the city through drainage canals, and the storm surge created three enormous breaches in the canals’ vulnerable floodwalls. Those gates are now in place, and two of them were pressed into service on Monday and worked.

Pumping stations that remove floodwater from the city have been toughened, and they did not fail as they did in 2005. And communication between the various organizations that worked to keep the city safe has been significantly improved.

Corps officials warn that the flood-control system is far from complete. Protection against the kind of storm that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year will not be complete until 2011. But they can point to real improvements in the hurricane protection system, and just as important, in the organization that runs it.

When water began rising in the drainage canals leading to Lake Pontchartrain in the northern part of the city, the team was ready.

The water in the London Avenue Canal neared four feet and was on its way to the maximum allowed height of five feet. Col. Alvin Lee, the district commander, started the process of getting approval to close the floodgate. That would block any storm surge from Hurricane Gustav, and huge pumps would push drainage water over the gates and into the lake.

Colonel Lee explained the process simply: “We drop the gates and start the pumps.” The process, which had been practiced repeatedly, took less than an hour. Later Monday evening, the corps closed the gates at the 17th Street Canal as well.

The team spent the overnight hours before the storm in a bunker, a squat building that sits inside a warehouse at the Army Corps’ district headquarters on high ground near the Mississippi River. It looks like a couple of trailers welded together. But these are not the standard-issue FEMA trailers that many New Orleanians still live in. The steel walls are double hulled, and the structure is bolted to the concrete floor.

With the realization early Monday morning that Hurricane Gustav had weakened significantly, the relief in the command center was palpable. Computer models of the surge generated by the storm suggested that the levee system would not be harshly tested, though corps officials expected that the heavy rains would flood the city, as heavy rains often do.

“I think the big event’s going to be the rain event here,” Colonel Lee said to Lt. Gen. Robert L. Van Antwerp, the commanding general for the corps, who flew in from Washington on Sunday to work with the local district.

Then the water started flowing over the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal floodwall.

The team worked intently as flood-gauge readings were projected onto walls. Officials monitored real-time computer data and struggled to make sense of the complex, fast-moving situation via radio, cellphone and BlackBerry.

Waves lapped over the west floodwall of the canal. A railroad bridge that the corps expected to be raised was at water level and restricting the flow of the canal, and its controls were inaccessible. Ships had broken loose from their moorings. Water was rising in the Mississippi.

Working without letup, the team members watched the floodwalls and levees that they had worked for three years to harden against storms.

The canal’s west floodwalls were not replaced after Hurricane Katrina because they stood up to that storm. But they have been strengthened. Additional soil was pressed against both sides of the floodwall to reduce the amount the wall sticks up above the soil surface, minimizing the exposed area. The soil was strengthened in some areas by mixing in durable clays, and relief wells were dug on the protected side of the wall to reduce seepage pressure.

Later in the day, corps officials emerged from the center to see the canal for themselves. They were stunned by the sight of the lowered bridge across the canal. Jammed against it like driftwood were three enormous barges and a 500-foot ship that was to be cut up for scrap.

“This is a huge dam right here,” said General Van Antwerp, who seemed flabbergasted. “We thought it was just the bridge” that was restricting the water flow, he said. “This has complicated it tenfold.”

By late afternoon, the level of the canal had gone down by about eight feet. The emergency appeared to be past, and the system had passed its first test. Col. Jeffrey Bedey, stopping at headquarters between trips to inspect other suspected weaknesses in the system, allowed a tired smile.

“We’re just lucky Mother Nature gave us what she gave us,” he said.

I just published an article on flood disaster mitigation and river rehabiliation

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:59:34 GMT

Flood Disaster Mitigation and River Rehabilitation by Marikina City, Philippines

by Gabrielle Iglesias and Carlyne Yu

Urban riverine flooding can be worsened by local urban processes and activities that cause river flow obstruction and pollution. This case study presents the flood mitigation efforts by Marikina City’s local authority and people, with a special focus on how the physical restoration of the riverbanks and solid waste clean-up contributed to flood disaster mitigation.

USGS Better Prepared to Help Emergency Officials Protect the Public this Hurricane Season

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 01:04:36 GMT

downloaded from: http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/dailynews/2008/jun/03/news6.html

The U.S. Geological Survey is better prepared to help protect the public this hurricane season by ensuring that emergency managers have quick access to critical water information.

A new downlink backup system guarantees the availability of streamflow information from more than 7,000 USGS streamgages across the nation. The backup system would kick in if the current downlink system is damaged during a storm, insuring that emergency managers have uninterrupted access to the information they need.

Information about stream flows is critical to making informed decisions about flood and storm response activities before, during and after a hurricane. In cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other federal, state and local agencies, the USGS operates a streamgage network that provides up-to-the-minute data that is critical in order to issue flood warnings and community evacuations.

"We could not accurately forecast river flows and water-levels without the data and support we receive from the USGS. When river and tide data are not available, our job of forecasting is much more difficult and typically results in diminished accuracy of those forecasts," said Dave Reed, Hydrologist-In-Charge of the National Weather Service Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center in Slidell, Louisiana.

Real-time water data from the streamgage network is transmitted to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's GOES satellite. The satellite then relays the transmissions to various satellite downlinks.

The command-and-data acquisition station at Wallops Island, Virginia is the most critical downlink because it is the only one to receive all of the transmissions. Since this station is located near the coast and is only about 15 feet above sea level, it is vulnerable to hurricanes and other storms. To ensure the continuity of continuous critical data in real time, the USGS, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, and other agencies have partnered to establish an emergency satellite data acquisition and dissemination unit at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center located in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Real-time information on flooding (from hurricanes as well as other causes) is always available on the USGS web site: http://water.usgs.gov/waterwatch/flood

In Memoriam: Regie

Mon, 05 May 2008 03:37:53 GMT

Regie was a happy man. I met him briefly three times as one of the members of a Technical Working Group for hydro-met disaster mitigation in Dagupan City. He was energetic, and he was always working hard to help the barangays in his city. He was a city official in charge of waste management, and he knew this was important to reduce vulnerability for flood disasters. He always gave me the impression of devotion to helping people improve their lives. His life was short but eventful. His wife died of cancer a few years ago, and he himself already had a bypass. Last night, he passed away due to a heart attack at age 40. With the way he tried to help as many as he could, those forty years probably amounted to more than 70 years of a self-indulgent life, than a career-oriented life, than an untried and untested life. I'm only guessing at this, since I met him only a few times, but I'm pretty good at sizing people up at the first handshake. So Regie, wherever you are, Life well spent!