A picture is worth a thousand words— especially in disaster relief.
Looking at a series of satellite images of Haiti taken before and after the January earthquake, it’s easy to visualize how quickly the displaced population fled to open areas and created spontaneous settlements. In just three days, most of the green space in one Port-au-Princegolf course was replaced by tarps, tents and other temporary shelters housing thousands of people.Additional aerial views of Haiti show nearby water pipes, drains and dams still standing after the earthquake as well as blocked and passable roads. Public health officials have been using maps such as these to provide food, water and medical supplies to the displaced population and to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.
To do so, relief organizations including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control are tapping free, Web-based tools to create and share maps that have been instrumental in the medical community’s response to the devastating earthquake. Never before have so many groups–from federal agencies to charitable organizations–been able to gather and distribute so much visual information about a disaster so fast.
“All of these tools allow people the capability to share and distribute information a lot quicker,” said Jim Tyson, the situational awareness section lead with the CDC’s Division of Emergency Operations. “In previous times, people and organizations would have had separate applications and separate databases built specifically for their needs. The technology architecture didn’t allow for interoperability.”
CDC’s maps were created following a 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on Jan. 12. The epicenter of the quake was 10 miles west of Port-au-Prince, the impoverished capital of Haiti.The Haitiquake caused massive damage, with more than 230,000 deaths and 300,000 injured, according to the latest official figures. Nearly 2 million people lost their homes and were forced into temporary settlements with questionable water supplies and poor sanitary conditions.Immediately following the quake, first responders used free, open-source mapping tools like Google Earth to track the migration of the displaced population and the condition of roads. Because Haiti’s Ministry of Health building collapsed, these tools also were used to survey the nation’s health infrastructure, including the location of hospitals and health centers.Now that the immediate crisis is over, the medical community in Haiti is using these mapping tools to set up a health reporting and communication network to help prevent the spread of diseases ranging from diarrhea to cholera. The medical community is particularly worried about keeping the displaced population healthy during the rainy season, which lasts from May to July, and the hurricane season in August and September.In its response to the Haiti earthquake, relief organizations are pioneering new uses of multi-layered, standards- based maps along with other Web 2.0 communications channels to ensure the accuracy of these maps.“By leveraging the technologies that are out there in the Haiti response, we have shown a magnitude of difference in how fast people were able to collaborate and discover who was working on certain elements of information,” Tyson said.
Satellite tracks trends
The CDC is using Google Earth to manipulate satellite imagery of the Port-au- Prince area and to layer it with data elements that are useful to the public health community. Use of this open-source software application has allowed the CDC to develop maps using standard formats—including KML and KMZ files—that are easily shared and accessed by relief organizations in the region.
“The hardest part of this job is determining what verified and relevant data is out there that we can use,’’ Tyson said. “It’s specific data that needs to be overlaid and put in context with the situation. A lot of enabling technologies have been developed that allow us to take the time and the effort out of that process, which is very important from a public health perspective. We need to get the information, collaborate and share the information.”
Within hours of the earthquake, the CDC had created a KML layer on a Google Earth map that showed every open area in Port-au-Prince where temporary settlements might occur. CDC sent out the map to the Department of Health & Human Services, the U.S.military and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), among others.
“First responders were able to determine rapidly where to put water stations and food stations because they knew days ahead of time where the thousands of people were settling,” Tyson said, adding that these maps aided in search and rescue immediately and then in the ongoing reconstruction.
Next, CDC’s situational awareness team created a map overlay with every known body of water, including rivers, streams and swimming pools. “We knew that it would only be eight hours before people were going to get thirsty, and within a day they’d be dipping into any standing body of water,” he said.
Once CDC and other relief organizations created multi-layered maps of Haiti, Web sites such as ReliefWeb, Geo- Commons and Haiti Earthquake Data Portal popped up to share the data contained in the maps.
“It started with Google groups like Shelter Cluster Haiti that blossomed,’’ said Dr. Jacqueline Burkholder, a public health scientist with CDC’s Division of Emergency Operations. “There was a big effort to try to locate the health facilities in Haiti. We tried to agree on a way to identify each one and how to geo-reference it and agree upon how to determine the ability for those facilities to see patients.”
CDC debuts Google Earth
The Haiti earthquake response is the first time that the CDC has used Google Earth and KML files.
“We’ve used paper maps and PowerPoint slides and some portal stuff, but this was the first time we were using other KML files and developing them ourselves,” Tyson said. He added that the good thing about KML files is that they are small, easy to e-mail and can be applied to existing Google Earth data.
“You can send it to a BlackBerry, and the user can download it and click on the geo-references automatically on Google Earth,” Tyson said. “When you pass your cursor over any spot, it will give you the latitude and the longitude. Our logistics folks had handheld GPS devices and could see any of the layers.’’
Another open-source tool that CDC is using is Adobe Flex, a free framework for creating animated Web applications that can be viewed consistently by various browsers and operating systems using the Adobe Flash Player. The CDC used Adobe Flex to create a histogram of the rates of infectious diseases at settlement camps. The bars on the map go up and down, showing the disease rate over time.
The CDC is using this technique to map rates of infection from malaria, Dengue fever and other diseases.
“Using SWF Macromedia Flash Files, you can attach this data, and all you need is a browser to be able to see the numbers associated with the bars,” Tyson said. “With some of the epidemiological data, this is the first time we are using SWF Macromedia Files. They are easy to attach to an e-mail, and you can use a Microsoft player to show the animation.”
One benefit of using open, standardsbased mapping tools is that it will be easier for the CDC to hand off the data it has collected to the Haitian government when the earthquake relief effort ends.
“We have 50 sites where CDC is actively collecting data. The goal for those sites is to turn the data over to the Haiti Ministry of Health,’’ Burkholder said. “The way we are collecting it—in SQL databases, KML or XL data sheets—will allow the Haiti Ministry of Health to continue the surveillance.”
Putting GPS to work
Another proponent of open-source mapping tools is the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), which is using BlackBerrys with GPS capabilities to survey the displaced population in Haiti and record their access to primary healthcare facilities.“We have information on 300 camps with at least 3,000 people each,” said Antonio Zugaldia, an information officer with PAHO’s Emergency Operations Center in Washington DC. “We want to know where the camps are, how big they are and the elevation. This project was not only to put them in a map. The elevation they have will also be useful in order to prioritize what to do with these camps when the rain starts.’’
With 50 staff located in Haiti prior to the quake and another 30 experts flown in afterwards, PAHO was able to quickly survey the number, condition and location of all the health facilities in the country and put all of that information in a map that was shared with other first responders.
“Nobody knew precisely the total number of facilities and precisely where they were. We were able to give some consistency to that information,’’ Zugaldia said, adding that PAHO has given all of the health information collected immediately following the earthquake back to the Haiti Ministry of Health.
PAHO staff entered the health data it gathered into simple, free mapping tools—such as Google Maps and Google Latitude–for sharing with other first responders such as the U.S.federal government, non-government organizations and volunteer organizations including Crisis Commons and Ushahidi.
People in the field were also using different tools for communicating their location, including Google Latitude, which is a tool to let you know where the different members of a team are on a map.
“You can’t say, ‘Let’s meet at a particular street,’ because the streets have been destroyed,” Zugaldia said. “Instead, you offer a real-time location using GPS on your BlackBerry and you can share that with your colleagues with Google Latitude. You can then easily divide your team into sub-teams and keep track of them. It’s a very simple tool that provided an excellent service.”
Another useful, open source software tool put to use in the Haiti response was OpenStreetMap, a free map that is edited and updated by users, much like the information in Wikipedia.“OpenStreetMap is a great example because when the quake happened, nobody had good maps of Port-au-Prince— nobody had a high level of detail on their maps,’’ Zulgaldia said. “Using very simple technologies like OpenStreetMap, they were able to provide a very good map of the city in 24 to 48 hours.”
Free mapping tools are helpful because first responders can access and share the information. “It’s important not only to have open source or free software behind what you do, which is great, but it’s important to have open standards and to have the data in a structure that everyone can understand so you can share it with everybody,” Zugaldia said.
“Our role in PAHO is that we were maintaining some of this data, but we always understood that the final owner and final recipient is the Haiti Ministry of Health.”
Initially, PAHO and other first responders relied on satellite-based maps. But later in the rescue effort, relief agencies were able to supplement the maps with information gathered on the ground via GPS and text messaging, and to share these maps via Web 2.0 communications channels such as Twitter.
“We were all using Twitter to advertise our products, including maps and situation reports,” Zulgaldia said. “It proved to be a very interesting tool in terms of following what other relief organizations were doing. PAHO had several Twitter channels in use. Our emergency center used it to promote all the materials we were collecting on Haiti, and we had 300 people following the updates we provided.”
Sourcing the diaspora
The medical community now faces the ongoing challenge of keeping its healthrelated maps up-to-date as the situation in Haiti changes.
One organization tackling this problem is Ushahidi, which provides a Webbased, open-source platform that gathers data via SMS, e-mail or the Web and displays it in a map or timeline. Ushahidi collects data from relief workers and residents located in the field in what’s called crowd sourcing.
“One thing that’s exciting about Ushahidi is that it’s a customizable mapping tool, which means that you can place whatever information you would like as long as there’s a location attached to it on a map,” said D. Rosalind Sewell, director of crisis mapping and a systems specialist at Ushahidi Haiti. Sewell is a graduate student at the Tufts University Fletcher Schoolof Law & Diplomacy. “For Haiti, that initially meant people trapped under rubble or people needing food and water or any other sort of assistance. They were using Ushahidi to broadcast that need and aggregate that need to the humanitarian world,” Sewell said.
“Now that we’re in the reconstruction phase, we’re looking to further customize the platform so we can move from crisis to redevelopment.’’
Sewell added that Ushahidi is adding information into the platform including shelter capacity, food supplies and disease outbreaks. “We are doing these community-based surveys and incorporating that into the platform,” she said. “Whatever a community wants to know, we are placing it into the map for the international community and first responders to see and understand.”
The Ushahidi mapping platform culls data from other tools such as OpenStreet- Map and Google Maps as well as Web 2.0 services like Twitter and Facebook. The volunteer group has a network of crisis mapping experts who sort through the information, confirm it and post it. The Ushahidi maps are available to people in the field via alerts and text messages that can be read on a cell phone.
Today, Ushahidi is being used by the displaced victims of the earthquake to broadcast information about their needs. This helps with the verification of the information.
“What’s interesting and integral is the integration of the diaspora into the mapping effort,” Sewell said. “Since week one, we have been bringing them into the conversation and having them look at the information and place it on the map. We are integrating them into the entire process and getting their feedback.’’
This helps improve the accuracy of the information because it’s coming straight from displaced victims of the earthquake, who have time to update the information, Sewell said.
“Members of the diaspora have more time and more bandwidth to verify the information,” she said, adding that Ushahidi is working with Haitian groups in the United States to translate the information that it receives in Creole. “What it provides is a link between the disasteraffected community and the first responders.”
For example, Ushahidi maps have shown where the need for food and tents is most acute and how that need changes over time. This information helps relief organizations and the Haitian government get supplies to where they are needed most.
“You can visually see where the need is and how it’s changing on the map,’’ Sewell said. “It allows for accountability. Maybe someone donated tents in this area, but people in this area still need tents. The maps help determine what happened and who dropped the ball.”
Ushahidi maps were also used to display field hospitals, pharmacies and medical supplies. Now the group is working with a team of doctors in Boston to create the ability to track the spread of infectious diseases. Ushahidi Haiti has a network of 300 volunteers that help create maps from the thousands of text messages and emails received from the field. Sewell says the data provided by the diaspora has been more accurate than the media in some cases.
“The news was overblown about security concerns like looting and gangs escaped from prisons,” said Sewell. “We were getting information directly from the ground that we had maybe four or five incidents of violence out of 2,000 people. Our information dispelled the myth of violence and put the attention elsewhere.”
“That’s the power of the platform,” she said. “It allows the community itself to sway what’s going on, and that has incredible applicability to the health field. The diaspora can explain their health needs without it being sensationalized to the rest of the world.”
