Managing Disasters With High-tech İmaging Could Save Lives

The debacle of Hurricane Katrina proved that scrambling for information during a disaster is no way to run an emergency response effort. Quick access to information is critical to saving life and property in the precarious hours following a disaster.

Improving disaster response is one of the goals of the Information Products Laboratory for Emergency Response, a partnership between Rochester Institute of Technology and the University at Buffalo. The collaboration will foster research to improve disaster mitigation planning, real-time response and recovery efforts, and to create potential business opportunities for industry.

The incubator, funded with $600,000 from the National Science Foundation, will focus on technology, policy and business-development and bring together university researchers, private sector service and product providers, and emergency response decision makers.

"The economic benefit of this initiative will be seen in the growth of disaster-related information products and workers who know how to use them," says Donald Boyd, RIT vice president of research and lead scientist on the project.

RIT and UB are leading centers in remote sensing, or the use of airborne sensors or satellite imagery to capture data over large areas. The laboratory team has extensive experience in fire and flood research, and previous collaborations with local emergency response personnel. Matching the needs of emergency responders with information products that combine remote sensing imagery with geographical information systems is central to the lab's mission. Geospatial analysis technology can be used to show crisis managers what is happening during a disaster, where events are occurring and how they might develop over time.

Information products developed at the RIT-UB lab will identify priority areas in disaster events through the use of digital elevation models of ground surfaces for flood-plain mapping using radar or light detection and ranging, or LIDAR, sensors, and multi-spectral infrared detection of fire and floods through long- and short-wave infrared sensing.

"By working with agencies, companies and end-users, IPLER allows us to leverage the broad expertise in disaster mitigation and response that is exemplified by the UB 2020 extreme events strategic strengthUB 2020 Strategic Strength on Extreme Events," says Chris Renschler, associate professor in the UB Department of Geography, leader of the UB team and research scientist of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and at UB's MCEER, (formerly known as the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research). "An important goal of this project is ensuring that the new technologies that we develop in our research labs at RIT and UB will best meet the needs of the people in agencies and industries who are charged with protecting our communities during disasters and attempting to improve their resilience in the face of natural and man-made hazards."