The Drone Age by Michael J. Boyle

Author:Michael J. Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Disaster Drones

The Nepal earthquake was not the first time that disaster drones were deployed in a natural disaster or emergency. As with most things related to drones, this began with the military. Immediately following a massive earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the United States provided overflights by Predator and eventually Global Hawk drones and released satellite imagery which aided the relief efforts.25 While this assistance was useful, the government of Haiti remained uneasy about the unfettered use of small drones over the disaster zone. Its initial reaction was to ban small UAVs for fear they would collide with civilian air traffic moving through the airspace for the relief effort. Later, in 2012, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) received approval to use smaller drones to assess the damage done to Haiti after its deadly earthquake. In cooperation with the United Nations, the IOM used drones to identify debris hazards, new construction, water drainage capabilities, and temporary housing in Port-au-Prince and the surrounding region.26 The IOM used drones to assess destroyed structures, to conduct surveys of public buildings, and to monitor internally displaced people (IDPs) and camps.27 Images supplied by drones constituted an improvement over satellite imagery, which by some estimates tended to underestimate the scale of the damage in Port-au-Prince.28 The results, according to the UN project leader, were “incredibly satisfying” and also notable because the Haitian displaced population was curious rather than hostile when seeing drones float by overhead.29

In the Philippines, drones were also used to assess the damage caused by Typhoon Haiyan in 2013.30 In this instance, one of the biggest problems was that the satellite imagery was outdated and some communities were relying on hand-drawn maps.31 To address this situation, a number of organizations sponsored projects and volunteered their time and resources to improve the quality of images available on the ground. Medair and Catholic Relief Services partnered to use drones to collect aerial imagery in the reconstruction efforts after the disaster.32 A comparatively new organization, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), used satellite imagery donated by a range of actors such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, Digital Globe, and the US State Department to create a picture of where the hardest hit regions were and which roads were considered impassable. They were also helped by the fact that the cost of satellite imagery had plummeted over the last decade and as a result was now used by a greater number of organizations and not just governments.33 By one estimate, over 1,500 volunteers in eighty-two countries participated in the effort to collect and map recent satellite imagery onto the terrain.34 With this data as a base, they were able to add UAV imagery from local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and create a detailed, street-by-street picture of the impact of the disaster. The chief obstacle that NGOs faced was a lack of coordination; many of these organizations did not know each other and were not aware of each other’s activities, which in turn undermined the effectiveness of the collective relief effort.35 Yet

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.