MapAction maps Bolivian floods for emergency response
Emese Csete, a volunteer for charity MapAction, describes the critical role geographical information systems played in providing maps for the emergency response to heavy flooding in Bolivia, which had affected more than 240,000 people and caused more than 40 deaths
You have a truck load of desperately needed food for villages whose homes have been destroyed by flood. You have a map but it proves useless.
A few hours up a mountain road your progress is blocked by a landslide. Or it might be a bridge that has collapsed. Or maybe you arrived but the villagers are gone – where is the displaced persons' camp?
If aid is to reach the people who need it so urgently, you need to know the lie of the land today – not yesterday's map.
This is the role of the charity MapAction, which has proved the value of using geographical information systems (GIS) with all its power to provide information on up-to-date maps within hours of a disaster occurring, so that the distribution of aid can be properly planned and so reach those in desperate need.
The charity, based in the English village of Little Missenden, reaches the scene of a major disaster usually within 24 to 48 hours (depending on distance) to provide mapping and geographical information to help the local government, the United Nations team organising humanitarian relief operations, as well as other NGOs. A MapAction team often flies to the scene with the UN's Disaster Assessment Team and provides that vital mapping service in the crucial first hours after a disaster has struck.
David Spackman, MapAction's Director says: 'Using the latest geographical information systems technology, we aim to produce real-time maps of the disaster area.'
'By continually updating the maps with details of road conditions, the state of bridges, numbers of people affected with their locations, and where medical facilities are operating or water facilities are located, we aim to relieve the burden on emergency workers in the crucial first hours and days of a humanitarian crisis. This enables them to plan and get on with the job of saving lives and alleviating suffering.'
MapAction has a team of around 40 volunteers trained and ready to deploy at a moments notice. They are all highly qualified professionals in the field of geographical information systems (GIS). In just four years the team has completed over 50 missions. Some where a full team of 15 or so have been deployed like in Sri Lanka after the Tsunami (2004/5), Pakistan after the earthquake (2005), the flooding in Ghana (2007) and Hurricane Dean in Jamaica (2007). Others, where just a small team of two to four have deployed, as in Mozambique May/July/October 2006, Dominican republic after Tropical Storm Noel in November 2007, Mexico after extensive flooding in November 2007.
MapAction's latest deployment in January/February this year was with a small team to Bolivia and here is a thumbnail sketch of that deployment as told by Emese Csete, one of MapAction's volunteers:
"It was an average Thursday evening for me (24th January 2008), I was watching a bit of TV, unwinding after a day's work, when a message arrived on my phone. I was expecting it to be a friend making plans for the weekend. Instead, I found an alert message telling me that a state of emergency had been declared in Bolivia, and that the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) was requesting our help. Just 36 hours later, I was at Heathrow airport waiting for the first of two flights to take me to La Paz, capital city of Bolivia.
The message was from MapAction. This was my first emergency deployment after joining MapAction last year and a chance to put my thorough training into action. The call was to deploy to Bolivia where since December 2007 heavy rains had caused severe flooding, which had affected more than 240,000 people and caused more than 40 deaths.
Emese Csete
By the time I reached the MapAction HQ on Friday evening, a comprehensive set of equipment was prepared and packed ready. Air tickets were waiting, as well as a briefing folder of contacts, hotel bookings, health risks, security issues, and what scarce information was available of the flooding in Bolivia. The results of a coordinated online data gathering exercise was ready to download onto the laptops - cleaned, categorised and renamed, including SRTM elevation data vector data such as VMAP - essential to enable us to start producing maps from the moment of arrival in the country.
This is the strength of MapAction; even with a small deployment like this, it is more than the sum of its visible parts - myself, my fellow team member Chris Ewing, and some computer and communications equipment - behind us is a team providing logistical and technical support around the clock, bringing together the skills and expertise of over 50 people.
Chris Ewing and I arrived in La Paz in the early hours on Sunday the 27th January 2008. As we approached the highest International airport in the world just as dawn was breaking we could see the extent of the flooding in the vicinity of the city and the curving paths of silty residue deposited by the flood waters as they flowed down from the Andes, snow capped in the near distance.
We arrived at the airport just before 7am Bolivian time and set up shop with the small United Nations Disaster Assessment Team (UNDAC) in the On-Site Operations Co-ordination Centre (OSOCC) at the UNICEF offices in La Paz. The problems are wide ranging - thousands of displaced people, contaminated water supplies, crops had been destroyed - and on top of it all, many roads had been affected, making delivery of aid much more difficult.
With the worry of more rain to come, the aim of the UNDAC team was to help get a good picture of the situation with the help of MapAction's mapping, as an aid to planning for further flooding should it happen.
By splitting the team, we were able to have a presence in Santa Cruz near the area badly affected. After ten days we were relieved by Hamish Pritchard and Naomi Morris to complete three weeks in country. With the ever changing emphasis in the acutely affected areas their efforts became focussed on the northern department of Beni, where they relocated along with the UNDAC team. Many situational maps were produced and elevation data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission allowed us to model the expected affects of the rising water. This helped the evacuation planning as did our analysis of satellite imagery to identify potential temporary camps.
Simultaneously we purposely worked with the military survey organisation that provided an individual for our team, and so enabled a smooth handover to an in-country resource, essential to ensure the sustainability of the mapping efforts.
As my first emergency mission, Bolivia provided me with a first hand experience of working within an emergency relief operation. Though an intense and demanding expedition, it was a very rewarding experience, and gave me a real insight into the value of emergency mapping and information management."
