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Sunday, 16 October 2005 |
The relief effort is gathering pace and the spatial side of presenting the information is attracting more of our attention: it is a complicated business and we are striving to develop ways - with the Humanitarian Information Centre (HIC) and a variety of other agencies - to capture the information available and present it in a vivid and informative way.
Incidentally, yesterday I forgot to mention that the night before last we experienced an aftershock of the earthquake; it occcured about half past midnight. It felt like a sudden herd of cattle had bolted outside the room and the room shook. It subsided almost instantly, and initially we were left wondering what on earth had happened. Weird and unsettling, and one can understand why the aftershocks of the main earthquake had people fleeing their buildings in terror .
Progress has been made with relief supplies, though the situation remains fraught. I'm very keen to unleash more of the power of GIS in our products, so I've been discussing with a number of interested parties how we can do this. It's proving a slow process to collect information from hundreds of agencies working in the field, and the cluster system is now trying, on the initiative of the HIC using a uniform table of information, to capture data in a form that can be used for multifarious purposes. We have a 'private' initiative in train, using one cluster, to trial a simple and vivid way of presenting the relevant information special to the cluster. This will probably entail pie charts and bar charts appended to a geographical location (not unlike the affected population map produced earlier in the week).
Maps awaiting collection
A local group of Pakistanis, all experienced trekkers have formed themselves into a series of teams under the HR officer of the British High Commission, and we have provided advice and ideas on how to collect data. We have lent them two GPS and given them some of our 24 hour ration packs, and offered to map their travels and the incidents and casualties and other disaster information they collect. They are going out for 5 days at a time and will trek up into the inaccessible valleys. A very spirited performance.
We have attracted interest from a number of influential quarters. The UNDAC leadership is very supportive of MapAction and we have tried hard to meet their expectations and requirements. In broad terms we have been successful and we have learned much as a team in the process. NATO representatives have arrived conducting a recce and so have US military - the latter providing us with valuable GIS data sets (of 50,000 scale - perfect for our purposes). Unfortunately we can not yet access the data owing to the unusual file system. We have passed the problem over to the UK team to solve.
In summary: another long day but a glimmer of results is beginning to break through in relief terms. There is still so much to be done.
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Deployment Diary 
