Mapping technology aids tsunami victims

In the aftermath of the tsunami that devastated the Indonesian province of Aceh in December 2004, dozens of villages were reduced to rubble fields. Most of the buildings and roads that once defined these communities simply vanished.

In the past year, a Northwest-based aid group has remapped some of these villages in digital form, trying to plot the effects of the disaster and deliver aid in a more efficient manner.

Mercy Corps, working with the University of Washington and the Pacific Disaster Center in Hawaii, used Geographic Information Services (GIS) mapping technology to plot everything from village survival rates to access to destroyed fish ponds.

Mercy Corps officials say the work has proved the worth of GIS in international aid work.

"What GIS allows us to do is put a huge amount of information on a map, and in a fashion that can be absorbed at a glance," said Paul Dudley Hart, a Mercy Corps director at large. "That's its power."

Some of the GIS mapping is built upon satellite images taken before and after the tsunami hit Aceh. The maps also plot data collected by Mercy Corps staffers — both Indonesian and international — as they traveled about the disaster zone with Global Positioning System tracking devices.

As the reconstruction effort gained momentum in the spring and summer, GIS sorted out mountains of information that might otherwise overwhelm aid workers.

The maps show the location of old roads. They pinpoint property lines. They detail the size and boundaries of hundreds of fish ponds washed away by the floodwaters, as a result of outlining the old ponds in satellite photos and then calculating their size and former locations.

The data then were put to practical use, such as settling property disputes or figuring out how much dirt would have to be hauled away to rebuild fish ponds.

Maps were made identifying banks that remained in business, helping to figure out which survivors had access to financial services.

The GIS maps also help convey the arc of the tragedy. One map, for example, documented household survival rates in the Banda Aceh area.

Used in other fields

GIS technology, developed about 15 years ago, is widely used in urban planning, forestry management and other fields.

The huge scale of tsunami destruction spurred Mercy Corps' interest in GIS mapping.

The outpouring of financial support created the opportunity, Hart said, "to try out some of our bravest ideas and see if they would work."

Last winter, Mercy Corps launched the effort by obtaining hundreds of satellite photos of the Aceh area from the Pacific Disaster Center. Some had been taken before the tsunami hit; most in the weeks after the disaster altered the Aceh landscape.

The Pacific Disaster Center then worked with the UW's Mark Lindenberg Center for Humanitarian Action, International Development and Global Citizenship to process the raw images so they were in a format that could be used in the field.

Taken from several hundred miles up, the high-resolution images covered 5-square-mile blocks, according to Rich Nezelek, a GIS imagery analyst with the Pacific Disaster Center.

Specialists recruited

Mercy Corps recruited two GIS specialists to take the technology to Indonesia.

Daphne Karypis, who arrived in Aceh about four months after the tsunami, had worked with GIS at the Science Museum of Minnesota and at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

She led a lot of the field work, helping organize a massive collection of data used to map 140 villages.

"The first step was to create property maps, and that's a big deal," Karypis said. "In some places, the land totally disappeared, and in some places there is nobody alive to claim it."

In May, Karypis was joined in Indonesia by Dylan Myers, a UW graduate student who worked as a GIS analyst at the Forest Service before contracting with Mercy Corps.

Myers helped organize and process information as it came from the field, and he also assisted Banda Aceh university students.

The students have carried on the mapping efforts since Myers' return to the United States.

"It just really hit me at a base level how this technology can help communicate," Myers said.

As for Mercy Corps, aid officials say they now have more confidence in GIS technology to help in recovery and hope to make more use of it in the years ahead.

"It's definitely a card that we're going to play," Hart said.

Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com