Geospatial Community Responds to Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria
*** While the capture of aerial imagery post-hurricane is key, the availability of pre-hurricane imagery is important in assessing impact as well. Nearmap, an end-to-end aerial imagery provider, has experience collecting, processing and delivering aerial imagery across the U.S. multiple times per year, storm or no storm. When disaster strikes, Nearmap collects new imagery and the prior aerial data they have stored comes in handy for comparison.
“Last year we captured Charleston, [S.C.], after the hurricane came through … In some cases you could see roof damage prior to the hurricane and there was the same roof damage after,” says Sean Kelly, director of U.S. survey operations at Nearmap. “So you’re able to look at it six months ago and say, ‘You already had that roof damage. You can’t file a claim saying the hurricane did this.’ I think that’s pretty valuable.”
Robert Carroll, vice president of Nearmap, highlights the fact that relying on post-disaster aerial imagery alone can often lead one to think that a given property was not impacted, when in fact it was. While the roofline may look perfectly intact, a building may have moved slightly off of its foundation. In this case, imagery collected beforehand illustrates the movement over time. “For example, in the Houston area and those locations, we collected as recently as May,” Carroll says. “We have that pre-event imagery and we go in as close as possible within the acceptance of putting airplanes and pilots [in the air] and not getting in the way of things. We try to get down there and capture the truth on the ground immediately after the event.”
In the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, Nearmap planes equipped with Nearmap’s proprietary HyperCamera2 system collected 7-centimeter orthoimagery of affected areas including: Corpus Christi and metropolitan Houston in Texas; and Naples, Fort Meyers, Cape Coral and the Florida Keys in Florida.
Teams collected data in the morning and delivered it by afternoon. The aerial imagery can be viewed on Nearmap’s Web-enabled MapBrowser viewer and WMS, WMTS and TMS API for seamless integration with Esri, AutoCAD and custom GIS applications. Looking ahead, Carroll says he is excited about efforts the company is taking to provide aerial data that helps identify at-risk properties before disasters occur.
