Disaster responsePlanetSense: Stepping in When Disaster Strikes
As Hurricane Dorian raged through the Bahamas, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory worked around the clock to aid recovery efforts for one of the Caribbean’s worst storms ever. The researchers helped direct that relief, churning out geographic data that guided decisions on everything from where to open emergency shelters to how to staff first-aid centers.
As Hurricane Dorian raged through the Bahamas, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory worked around the clock to aid recovery efforts for one of the Caribbean’s worst storms ever.
Dorian made landfall on the island nation Sept. 1, 2019, with winds that topped speeds of 185 mph, leaving communities devastated in its wake and relief agencies around the globe scrambling to assist survivors. Gautam Thakur, a research scientist in ORNL’s Geospatial Science and Human Security Division, and his team helped direct that relief, churning out geographic data that guided decisions on everything from where to open emergency shelters to how to staff first-aid centers.
“One of the things that makes me proud to come in here every day is knowing the impact we can make by saving lives in this way,” Thakur said. “We’re doing things that matter for national security and global peace.”
Thakur, whose research focuses on the intersection of people, places, and computing, leads work on the PlanetSense program, a digital dragnet and real-time mapping platform that draws on volunteered geographic information (such as public posts on Facebook and Twitter about what’s happening in a particular place), breaking news, the internet of things, and other online chatter to track disasters and other major events worldwide as they happen. The program got off the ground about three years ago, part of the Geoinformatics Engineering Group.
“Any time something like this happens, there’s a large trail of location-based data out there that people like you and me put out from moment to moment,” Thakur said. “People are sharing pictures and videos on public-domain websites as events happen in real time. They’re implicitly volunteering critical geographic information: ‘I’m here in the Grand Bahamas, and the hospital where I work is damaged.’ But there were no tools to real-time process all this data. We know we have the required computational competency here at ORNL that can process it accurately and at high speed.”
Thakur’s team combined the details harvested by PlanetSense with satellite imagery of the hurricane and laid that picture over flood maps of the islands to pinpoint Dorian’s impact. The team then identified the places hardest hit, from a sky-level view to individual buildings, sewer systems, and power grids.
