| Digital Mapping Has Practical Applications in Emergency Management Crisis Situations
Atlantic Technologies provides digital orthophotos to cooperating Los Alamos agencies fighting Cerro Grande fire
By Carol Lynn Coffey The practical applications of digital mapping were proven to be an incredible asset recently when an enormous fire in Los Alamos, N.M., threatened public and private lands, businesses, homes and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. An erroneous decision to set a controlled burnoff within the boundaries of the Bandelier National Monument near Los Alamos resulted in one of the most expensive fire events in American history. The Cerro Grande Fire, as it was labeled, took over 1500 fire personnel, 10 helicopters, 50 fire engines, 15 aerial tankers and assistance from a digital photogrammetry firm in Huntsville, Ala., to contain the out-of-control blaze. Fall 1999
Expecting some transfer of lands in the year 2000, last fall the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) requested that the Mobile District United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) design a digital orthophoto base mapping project over a large area of the expansive LANL territory. Under their Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity contract with ATLANTIC Technologies of Huntsville, Ala., the Mobile District USACE negotiated the project which was carried out earlier this year. February 2000
ATLANTIC flew the project producing the aerial photography with Airborne GPS and one of the newer technologies in the industry today, an Applanix Inertial Measuring Unit (IMU). The IMU is mounted on the top of a state-of-the-art Leica RC-30 aerial camera and is used to measure the tip and tilt of the camera at the exact time of exposure. This information is transmitted to an onboard computer and stored in a file for post-processing. The IMU and RC-30 work in conjunction with the Leica ASCOT Airborne GPS also used by ATLANTIC. Post-processed Airborne GPS and IMU data are used as supplemental parameters in the analytical aerial triangulation process, and subsequently in the final bundle block adjustment. By pairing the IMU with the Airborne GPS, the number of ground control points can be significantly reduced without jeopardizing mapping accuracy.
Sea Systems Corporation of Pompano Beach, Fla., conducted the ground control, and assisted with static GPS data collection using multiple base stations. After acquiring the field data, ATLANTIC produced color digital orthophotos for all the LANL lands and the city of White Rock, N.M. The delivery included 1"=300' maps and color digital orthophotos at 1"=300' and one-foot ground pixel resolution. The files were saved in .tiff files formatted in Bentley's Microstation.
Since 1988, the National Park Service has had a policy of prescribed burns to avoid the kind of fire that swept through Yellowstone National Park and burned one million acres of timber and meadows. Land managers for Bandelier National Monument have scheduled an annual burn of brush, trees and deadfall to help avoid uncontrollable wildfires. Thursday, May 4
On Thursday, May 4, 2000, a prescribed burn was authorized by Bandelier superintendent Roy Weaver and set by park employees. Their intention was to clear 900 acres and prevent an uncontrolled wildfire. Exceptionally dry underbrush and high winds turned a controlled burn into an uncontrolled inferno. By Friday, May 5, park employees and officials knew they had a big problem. Friday, May 5
As the fire breached established fire lines and grew to over 2000 acres, twice the intended prescribed burn area, it began spreading north and west assisted by exceptionally high winds and low humidity. The LANL is located southeast of the town of Los Alamos, which is located at the top of a mountain. According to an Albuquerque Tribune interview with Tom Zimmerman, a National Park Service fire science and ecology program leader at the National Interagency Fire Center, fires escalate when moving up a hill, and slow when moving down a hill. The high winds and dry atmosphere, along with access to the top of the mountain, made Los Alamos an especially easy target for the growing Cerro Grande Fire. Sunday, May 7
By Sunday, May 7, the fire had again doubled in size and a U.S. Forestry Service management team was assigned to take over direction of fire operations from the Bandelier Monument officials. The fire was moving swiftly through business and residential areas. In some cases only a 30-minute notice was given before evacuation was required. On Monday, May 8, fire fighting personnel reached 800. They were supported by seven helicopters and four aerial tankers. Outer buildings on LANL were being threatened.
The news of the fire saturated the national news. ATLANTIC project coordinator Kasey Brown, who negotiated the orthophotography delivery order with the Mobile District USACE, contacted the Region 4 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in Denton, Texas. Brown told Charles Barnes, Director of the Region 4 Operations Center, about the recent maps ATLANTIC provided LANL.
When Barnes tried to contact the incident commander at LANL, he found that the laboratory had been evacuated, so the maps were inaccessible. U.S. Forest Service Fire and Aviation Management Regional Planner Martin Martinez expressed to Barnes a dire need for high-resolution maps of the area in order to determine the concentration of dry brush and the possible direction of the fire. Friday, May 12, 9:00 a.m. CST
On Friday, May 12, Barnes' FEMA Region 4 office contacted Donald Thrower at the Mobile District USACE in an effort to get copies of the color digital orthophoto files. However, the original format of the map files were not compatible with any of the software used by any of the agencies involved in the fire operations. Friday, May 12, 12:00 p.m. CST
The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) set a deadline for ATLANTIC. They needed the map files in Los Alamos, in a usable format, by 7:00 p.m. Mountain Time that evening. Otherwise the maps would be of no use because the areas they covered would no longer be salvageable. At 12:00 p.m. Central Time, Brown assigned a production team on a priority translation effort to change the files from Microstation into ESRI ARC/INFO and ARC/VIEW files, which could be utilized by all of the agencies involved in fighting the fire.
However another problem cropped up. The files were much too large to upload electronically in an efficient amount of time and would never be available by the USFS deadline. Friday, May 12, 4:00 p.m. CST
At 4:00 p.m. Central Time, after a police escort to Huntsville International Airport, Brown and ATLANTIC Chief of Aerial Operations, Matthew Rainey, boarded a Learjet bound for Albuquerque, N.M. Traveling at over 500 mph, the jet landed in New Mexico at 6:00 p.m. Mountain Time. Brown turned over the digital files to Martinez, who had met him at the airport. The ARC/INFO and ARC/VIEW files, containing georeferenced, high-resolution digital orthophotos and showing the ground at one-foot pixel resolution, were rushed to the Fire Operations Center and immediately put to use by fire fighting coordinators to use in planning water drops by aerial tankers. The digital orthophotos are more accurate and a much higher resolution than the quadrangle maps already in use. Tuesday, June 6
The Los Alamos Cerro Grande Fire was the most costly wildfire in U.S. history. Damage to LANL alone is estimated at $120 million. The Department of the Interior has already acknowledged responsibility for the fire and the damage to homes and businesses has yet to be completely assessed. By the time the fire was fully contained on Tuesday, June 6, over 1500 fire personnel, 10 helicopters, 50 fire engines and 15 aerial tankers had been a part of the fire-fighting operations. Over 50,000 acres of land were burned, including more than 200 homes and other buildings. The maps provided by ATLANTIC are now being used by the Department of the Interior and other agencies to determine the amount of damage.
The maps will aid in determining reparation to residents and businesses for loss of property, as well as analyzing change detection in the burned and surrounding areas, which may help in prevention of erosion and other problems.
Digital mapping has long been used in planning, but the Los Alamos Cerro Grande Fire is a prime example of its uses in emergency management crisis situations. Back |
