Week 4 Participation

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Oil Animation

This is a collection of the oil extent from various days put into animation. I tried to find more days to add to this but the only shapefiles I could find were of the fisheries closures.

Summary

Geographic Information Systems play a large role in disaster response. GIS can help response agencies in the event of Earthquakes, Floods, Hurricanes, and most recently the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The disasters exact location can be pinpointed with GIS to determine the extent of the damage and where the damage was the greatest. This will also allow the GIS users to determine where relief support is needed the most, what resources are available and their locations, and what infrastructure is available to supply the relief aid. Quickly locating people with high needs, such as elderly, physically sick, or mentally ill, can be done in efficiently in a GIS. Knowing the demographics of an affected area can help the responders deal with any language barriers. For example in Bayou la Batre, Alabama there is a large Vietnamese population. After hurricane Katrina help was slow to get to them because of the language barrier, had a translator gone in with the first responders the situation would have gone much smoother.

GIS is playing an important role in dealing with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster. The mapping of the oil plume and fishery closures has become an everyday occurrence for us now. The fight against oil is also being done with GIS, booms are marked and recorded, and the agencies can tell how much boom is at each staging area. Sensitive areas are marked and protected with extra boom. Unfortunately this disaster isn’t even close to over, but I know GIS will play a large role throughout.