Dibya Sarkar, GIS aids the Coast Guard, Federal Computer Week, October 3, 2005. (Thanks to Patrice McDermott.) Excerpt:
In helping the Coast Guard with their rescue operations in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina, Talbot Brooks had to calculate – in minutes – the coordinates of people who were stranded on rooftops or elsewhere. Brooks, director of Delta State University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies in Cleveland, Miss., assembled geographic information system experts to help with the rescue and recovery efforts. For the Coast Guard, his team translated more than 100 street addresses into degrees, minutes and seconds required for helicopter and land-base rescues. For example, Brooks recalled one phone call handed to him at the emergency operations center. A young man said he had just spoken to his mother, who was trapped in the water treatment facility in Waveland, Miss. “And people were shouting, ‘Hurry she’s dying, she’s dying,’” Brooks said. “And that’s all the information we had.” Brooks said they used a combination of vector data and aerial photographs of the area before the hurricane. They found the water treatment plant in the imagery and gave the latitude and longitude to the Coast Guard within seven minutes, he said....GIS professionals from various Mississippi universities and the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association’s GISCorps volunteered to help Brooks with numerous tasks at the state’s emergency operations center in Jackson County. The experts also created a missing persons database and plotted their last known locations on a map. At last count, they produced more than 400 search and rescue maps for first responders showing the last known location of more than 10,000 missing persons. Additionally, they collected and mapped vital data such as power outages; cell tower and coverage areas; location of hazardous material, such as underground gas storage; location of wells, electrical substations and other critical infrastructure; and locations of shelter, food and water distribution points and capacities.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/05/2005 12:07:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
