Japan Prospers Despite a Triple Hit

December 12, 2011 By: Art Kalinski

GIS Helps with the Recovery

Last week I concluded a two-week visit to Japan. My wife and I visited my daughter who followed in my footsteps as a Naval officer stationed on the USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) home ported in Yokosuka. We were going to visit her earlier but the earthquake and Tsunami precluded a visit at that critical time. The visit was a great opportunity to learn first hand how GIS/GPS helped with the rescue and recovery efforts.

The triple hits of and earthquake, Tsunami, and then the nuclear power plant disaster was an absolute body blow to Japan. The U.S. military and especially the Navy mobilized immediately to help with rescue and recovery efforts patrolling areas off the east coast of Japan. As we all saw in the news, the devastation in the affected areas was as complete as driving a bulldozer through entire cities. Buildings, street signs, and even the pavement and sidewalks were gone. Very few people have ever experienced such total and unannounced devastation.

Add to that the unprecedented damage to a nuclear reactor plus the shutdown of two others and Japan faced a crushing confluence of disasters that would have stopped other countries dead in their tracks for months or longer. The Navy used ships and aircraft to search for survivors but mostly recovered bodies that were then flown to land-based facilities for identification.

There were numerous side tragedies that most of us didn’t read about that the Navy, using GPS technology, was able to mitigate. When the Tsunami hit, it broke loose hundreds of fishing boats from their moorings and carried them out to sea. For most owners, their boats were their livelihoods and also represented their life savings, so the losses were devastating. The Navy was able to locate, photograph, and recorded the GPS position of many boats adrift at sea. They put that information on a website which permitted owners to determine the survival and location of their boats, thus helping them recover their lifetime investment.

Another tragedy was that among the large amount of floating debris were numerous boxes containing valuables and even life savings. It seems that many rural Japanese didn’t believe in banks and kept their saving in or under their homes. With the Tsunami most everything in some locations was washed to sea never to be seen again. However, recovered boxes were turned over to Japanese authorities and some reunited with their owners if the box contained ID and if the owners survived. Not surprising for the Japanese people, there were no instances of fraudulent claims and many boxes are still unclaimed. Again, GPS identified the location of the recovered boxes and analysis was done to determine the most likely starting point.

With three power plants off line, electric usage was beyond critical. The community-minded Japanese all cooperated to reduce usage and black outs were avoided. When I visited last week all appeared normal in Tokyo, the location of Esri Japan. I was hosted by two Esri Japan staffers,Hideyuki Fujisawa and George Suzuki. They explained how immediately after the triple disaster, Professor Haruo Hayashi of Kyoto University in conjunction with Esri Japan and multiple voluntary organizations set up an emergency response GIS operation at the Japanese Cabinet Offices in Tokyo to handle all the GIS requests that poured in. This reminded me very much of the response to our 9/11 in which an ad hoc team of state, local, and ESRI staffers set up a GIS operation in a west side dock warehouse and produced more than 1,200 maps. The Japanese team produced over a thousand maps but this is a bit of an understatement, since they also had web services that received countless hits without the need of a paper print.

The GIS operation created numerous maps and web services showing different aspects of the damage and response. One example was a street centerline map that showed passable roads. As the roads were repaired, the network was updated so citizens could understand how far they could travel on the road system.

They also used Spatial Analyst to show radiation data as a continuous surface using Kriging to estimate data values between collection points. For those of you that haven’t used Spatial Analyst and GRID cell modeling, this is a very powerful tool that can take your GIS operation beyond traditional points, lines, and polygons. See my June 2008 GSS Column “Grid Cell Modeling - The Other GIS” to learn the power of being able to display data that is a continuous function rather than just simple discrete polygons.

Since the devastation included many government buildings, parcel maps in those buildings were also lost. However, everyone was relieved that GIS maps had been created previously with digital copies stored in remote locations. The team was able to reconstruct many of those maps which were then used to help with rescue and recovery efforts.

Professor Haruo Hayashi and his team worked with local agencies to create an organized effort to help with the distribution financial aid from the Japanese government to disaster victims similar to what FEMA does here. They trained teams of workers to use maps to identify homes that were damaged or lost. The workers then took photos of the affected property and that information was entered into a database. The database information then was used to pay out grants based on the severity of the loss.

The U.S. Navy provided support during the critical first week after the disasters. However, to the great credit of the Japanese, once they caught their breaths there was no standing around hand wringing. They thanked the Navy for all their help, took over the efforts, and immediately got to work restoring their country.

Lessons Learned

The ESRI staff cited several lessons learned:

Be prepared to set up an emergency GIS operation on short notice in any location.
Back up your data where it will be safe and easily retrievable.
Social media sites are becoming more useful to gather observations from broad geographic locations.

Specific bottlenecks in the Japanese recovery were:

Training of new personnel to do the field data collection.
Building the new and complex databases related to recovery.
Issuing the certificates for financial aid to the countless victims.
Assessing the massive scope of the disaster.

Now that most of the recovery efforts have been completed, GIS is being used to analyze the disaster to determine factors that mitigated losses. One example was that some highways that were built above grade level served as a barrier to some flooding. This will become an important factor in future highway construction.

I can’t over emphasize how important it is for each of us in the GIS community to have an emergency plan of action to support our local communities with the valuable resource we manage. In the event of a disaster, we have the hardware, software, data, and most important trained GIS analysts that can make a critical difference in the event of an emergency. See my first column for Geospatial Solutions “What Can You Do for Your Country?”, January 8, 2008.

Additionally we all need to be personally prepared. Visit the DHS site for the basics and please take the recommendations to heart. As a GIS professional, your talents will be needed during a disaster. You will want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.