earthquake relief
Date: 2011/Oct/24 23:00
The Turkish Prime Minister expressed concerns that far more destruction from the earthquake would be found in outlying/remote areas which had lost contact and are difficult to reach. With our modern satellite photo-surveillance, shouldn't we be able to answer that? Within a day or two shouldn't we have new photo data to compare before/after to identify where all the destroyed houses, roads, and bridges are?
This doesn't require military-grade count-the-plates-on-the-picnic-table resolution; we're talking about houses and apartment buildings. And this kind of before/after image comparison can be done by computers. Shouldn't we be able to indentify the areas with extensive damage - where people are likely to have lost their homes - and estimate how many people are in those areas (based on the number of buildings)? So we could/should know where people need tents and bedding and food?
And if the bridges are out or roads are blocked, we'd know those areas would need air drops. This shouldn't take weeks to figure out. Maybe we could even drop some satellite phones and batteries into the areas we don't hear from.
[This entry was originally posted as http://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/477900.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]
The Turkish Prime Minister expressed concerns that far more destruction from the earthquake would be found in outlying/remote areas which had lost contact and are difficult to reach. With our modern satellite photo-surveillance, shouldn't we be able to answer that? Within a day or two shouldn't we have new photo data to compare before/after to identify where all the destroyed houses, roads, and bridges are?
This doesn't require military-grade count-the-plates-on-the-picnic-table resolution; we're talking about houses and apartment buildings. And this kind of before/after image comparison can be done by computers. Shouldn't we be able to indentify the areas with extensive damage - where people are likely to have lost their homes - and estimate how many people are in those areas (based on the number of buildings)? So we could/should know where people need tents and bedding and food?
And if the bridges are out or roads are blocked, we'd know those areas would need air drops. This shouldn't take weeks to figure out. Maybe we could even drop some satellite phones and batteries into the areas we don't hear from.
[This entry was originally posted as http://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/477900.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]