One Year After The Lebanon Blast, What Role Did GIS Play?
The blast event of the 4th August 2020, which devastated large parts of Beirut, was one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in history. Approximately 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate representing 1.1 kilotons of TNT equivalent, stored in a warehouse at the port, exploded causing extensive damage over the entire capital and was felt in countries such as Turkey, Syria, Israel and Cyprus more than 250 km away.
The aftermath of the explosion reveals at least 200 deaths and over 6,000 injured people while the 15 billion $ in property damage is leaving an estimate of 300,000 people homeless. The country will take years if not decades to fully recover from this tragedy.
THE ROLE OF GIS IN THE AFTERMATH
Many humanitarian organisations such as the UN, Mediar, Red-cross, local community and government authorities have turned to geospatial technology in finding answers about the devastation the blast caused. For example, UN-Habitat deployed staff to Beirut Municipality and was leading the digitization of damage assessment data for buildings through a mobile application, GIS and mapping support.
ESRI (https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/69ff1da6899c48f6b334907a421aece9) created an elaborate story map the visualized everything you needed to know about the aftermath. The story map can help analyse charts, images, location extract information. Another story map looks at how the port of Beirut was ravaged by the blast. The port handles 60% of Lebanon’s imports & storage of its food & medical reserves.
The Beirut Urban Lab team made available online to download the geo-referenced base map of Beirut that it had developed in partnership with the Lebanese National Council for Scientific Research. During the following weeks, the map was widely used for surveys by several stakeholders, including the Lebanese Army’s Forward Emergency Room. The map was used to conduct the damage survey of the Order of Engineers and Architects (OEA), and several other NGOs, INGOs, and contractors working for post-disaster assessments.
During the months after the blast, the Beirut Urban Lab’s GIS Team also supported the damage surveys of the Order of Engineers and Architects (OEA) and AUB’s MSFEA Post-Disaster Building Structure Safety Hotline, producing regular updates and damage assessments of the neighbourhoods affected by the blast.
WHAT CAN WE LEARN?
1. THE NEED FOR GIS IN THE HUMANITARIAN SECTOR
Such disasters underscore why we need GIS, especially access to high pixel earth imagery to conduct a proper analysis. Humanitarian practitioners need to embrace GIS as more natural disasters and wars continue to increase across the world.
2. MORE INVESTMENT IN GIS R&D
Investing in Imagery may seem expensive but it will be worth it in the long run. Major Multinationals like Intel, Amazon, Google, SpaceX, Esri and Oracle are investing in geospatial technology. Intel and Amazon joined forces to create Intel geospatial, a GIS imagery platform that utilizes Artificial Intelligence and machine learning for everyday use.
3. MORE ACCESS TO GIS OPENSOURCE SOFTWARE
The rise of Open Source software in the geospatial community will go a long way in helping field workers during a crisis like the one witnessed in Lebanon. Such platforms like QGIS, GeoPython, GEE, GRASS GIS, OpenstreetMaps where third party developers and add different features specifically meant for humanitarian disaster is highly welcomed.
Let us hope such a calamity like this will never happen again, unfortunately, that is only wishful thinking as more and more events keep occurring such as fire’s in Turkey, Greece and the United States. GIS is becoming more and more relevant in analyzing such situations and extracting meaningful patterns.
