{"id":5082,"date":"2025-03-25T17:02:33","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T18:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/?p=5082"},"modified":"2025-03-27T15:53:34","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T15:53:34","slug":"change-leader-immediate-accurate-data-key-to-emergency-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mywatchseries.me\/index.php\/2025\/03\/25\/change-leader-immediate-accurate-data-key-to-emergency-response\/","title":{"rendered":"Change Leader: Immediate, Accurate Data Key to Emergency Response"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This interview was recorded by Todd Danielson, the editorial director of\u00a0<\/span>Informed Infrastructure<\/span>. You can watch a video of the full interview above or by visiting <\/span>bit.ly\/4icMowX<\/span>.<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Experience with Disasters<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst on the site are the public-safety people,\u201d explains Dormeyer. \u201cThey need to get an understanding of what they\u2019re dealing with. They\u2019re going to want to understand which areas are difficult or dangerous to access.\u201d<\/p>\n

To describe how EagleView\u2019s 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. \u201cWhat are the things we\u2019re trying to solve for, and who are the folks we need to get the imagery to the fastest?\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

Simultaneously, they\u2019re in constant contact with the customers\u2014often first responders or local municipalities\u2014asking 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting that data in the hands of those people is critically important, so they can start to make those dispatch decisions,\u201d notes Dormeyer. \u201cThen they take [the data] into their own internal workflows and start dispatching people.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Dormeyer, experience in dealing with these events is a major advantage. \u201cWe don\u2019t know when and where a hurricane\u2019s going to show up, but we know how to respond, and there\u2019s a set of contingencies\u2014lack of power, lack of access, internet connections\u2014that we know how to deal with, because we\u2019ve been doing it for a while,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cbefore\u201d and \u201cnormal\u201d imagery to compare with what\u2019s collected during and after a disaster event.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can identify all those changes, so we can get straight to that user, that dispatcher, and say, \u2018look, this used to be a bridge, and now the bridge is over here.\u2019 And visually they can easily get to it and understand what they need to do next,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Advice for Engineers<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dormeyer notes that engineers provide crucial feedback that opens new pathways for imagery use that hadn\u2019t been considered, but they sometimes constrain themselves to approaches they\u2019re used to before exploring imagery\u2019s benefits.<\/p>\n

\u201cInfrastructure folks and engineers are used to going in their workflow, assessing properties, doing inspections, triaging, using some older technologies,\u201d he explains. \u201cWe still hear about people flying helicopters when they\u2019re looking at [power] lines. You really need to look at what the \u2018art of the possible\u2019 is with this type of data.\u201d<\/p>\n

He believes imagery helps \u201cbring the field to the desk\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot you can do without necessarily throwing manpower and dispatching people to get in a truck and drive to an asset,\u201d adds Dormeyer. \u201cThere\u2019s a tremendous number of use cases that [engineers] should explore, because the technology\u2019s come a long way. And with improvements in AI and all that\u2019s available in terms of extracting information out of imagery and making it useful, we\u2019ve come leaps and bounds.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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About Todd Danielson<\/a><\/h3>\n

Todd Danielson has been in trade technology media for more than 20 years, now the editorial director for V1 Media and all of its publications: Informed Infrastructure, Earth Imaging Journal, Sensors & Systems, Asian Surveying & Mapping, and the video news portal GeoSpatial Stream.<\/p>\n

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