Change Leader: Immediate, Accurate Data Key to Emergency Response

Few will argue that natural disasters are increasing in frequency and devastation, and continued population growth is also making them more expensive. The 2024 hurricane season was especially destructive in the southeast United States, and 2025 began with massive and deadly wildfires in California.

Civil and structural engineers can play a large role in designing infrastructure and buildings to be more resilient to the onslaught of potential destruction, including human-induced tragedies such as at the Francis Scott Key bridge in Maryland, but they can also help emergency responders in the moments before and after a disaster to assess damage, see what needs to be done and hopefully save lives and structures. A key tool is current and accurate geospatial data from the impacted areas, and imagery is an important and quickly accessible data format.

Experience with Disasters

EagleView launched in 2008 and unveiled its Disaster Response Program in 2019 to assist post-event recovery efforts ranging from wildfires and flooding to tornadoes, hurricanes and terrorist incidents.

“First on the site are the public-safety people,” explains Dormeyer. “They need to get an understanding of what they’re dealing with. They’re going to want to understand which areas are difficult or dangerous to access.”

To describe how EagleView’s response program typically works, Dormeyer uses a hurricane scenario as an example. The team tries to determine if the event is large enough to impact a densely populated area or infrastructure, and if it will do significant damage. Then they look at what equipment would be needed (typically fixed-wing planes or drones) and what the imagery targets, resolutions and the captures should be. “What are the things we’re trying to solve for, and who are the folks we need to get the imagery to the fastest?” he adds.

Simultaneously, they’re in constant contact with the customers—often first responders or local municipalities—asking them about their key concerns, what data need to be delivered and how. Data typically are delivered via a cloud-based system, but in case of power or internet-connectivity loss, hard drives and other data caches can be used.

“Getting that data in the hands of those people is critically important, so they can start to make those dispatch decisions,” notes Dormeyer. “Then they take [the data] into their own internal workflows and start dispatching people.”

According to Dormeyer, experience in dealing with these events is a major advantage. “We don’t know when and where a hurricane’s going to show up, but we know how to respond, and there’s a set of contingencies—lack of power, lack of access, internet connections—that we know how to deal with, because we’ve been doing it for a while,” he adds.

Dormeyer also notes that a central component of effective imagery use is having preexisting imagery to compare it to. Like other imagery companies, EagleView regularly flies vast areas to have an existing database of “before” and “normal” imagery to compare with what’s collected during and after a disaster event.

“We can identify all those changes, so we can get straight to that user, that dispatcher, and say, ‘look, this used to be a bridge, and now the bridge is over here.’ And visually they can easily get to it and understand what they need to do next,” he says.

Advice for Engineers

Dormeyer notes that engineers provide crucial feedback that opens new pathways for imagery use that hadn’t been considered, but they sometimes constrain themselves to approaches they’re used to before exploring imagery’s benefits.

“Infrastructure folks and engineers are used to going in their workflow, assessing properties, doing inspections, triaging, using some older technologies,” he explains. “We still hear about people flying helicopters when they’re looking at [power] lines. You really need to look at what the ‘art of the possible’ is with this type of data.”

He believes imagery helps “bring the field to the desk” to help with crucial infrastructure tasks such as change detection as well as understanding how the environment has shifted due to an event or natural forces through time, such as erosion.

“There’s a lot you can do without necessarily throwing manpower and dispatching people to get in a truck and drive to an asset,” adds Dormeyer. “There’s a tremendous number of use cases that [engineers] should explore, because the technology’s come a long way. And with improvements in AI and all that’s available in terms of extracting information out of imagery and making it useful, we’ve come leaps and bounds.”