{"id":326381,"date":"2020-04-07T19:59:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-08T02:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&p=326381"},"modified":"2020-04-07T18:22:12","modified_gmt":"2020-04-08T01:22:12","slug":"real-time-gis-apps-quicken-response-to-earthquake-in-albania","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/real-time-gis-apps-quicken-response-to-earthquake-in-albania","title":{"rendered":"Real-Time GIS Apps Quicken Response to Earthquake in Albania"},"author":5752,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[423862,237591,10652],"tags":[4381,163382,151642,30072,288722],"arcnews_issues":[430091],"class_list":["post-326381","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arcgis-dashboards","category-disaster-response","category-survey123-for-arcgis","tag-apps","tag-arcgis-online","tag-earthquake","tag-emergency-response","tag-esri-distributors","arcnews_issues-spring-2020","arcnews_sections-news"],"acf":{"short_description":"Location-based surveys and dashboards helped citizens, local agencies, and international organizations work together.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"At 3:54 a.m. on November 26, 2019, a 6.4-magnitude earthquake jolted people awake across central Albania. It was the most powerful earthquake to hit the southeastern European country since 1979\u2014and its deadliest. Fifty-one people died, and approximately 2,000 were injured.\r\n\r\nThe destruction was extensive, especially in Durr\u00ebs, the town closest to the epicenter. About 900 buildings in the coastal city were damaged, and many, including the seven-story Vila Palma hotel, collapsed.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe were in a panic situation,\u201d said GIS specialist Glen Olli, who works for Esri\u2019s official distributor in southeastern Europe, GDi. His office, in Albania\u2019s capital of Tirana, is located about 25 miles from Durr\u00ebs. \u201cIt was a workday, so as soon as we got to the office [later that morning], we grabbed our laptops and went outside to be safe. Then we started developing apps.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":326501,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"\u201cIn Albania, the emergency services and other authorities were not prepared for such an event,\u201d said Shpati Jupe, managing director of GDi Tirana. It was an all-hands-on-deck moment, with agencies across Albania and experts from around the world pitching in.\r\n\r\nJupe and Olli got in contact with staff at the City of Durr\u00ebs to see how they could be of service. The internet was still up and running, so with support from the Esri Disaster Response Program (DRP), the small team in Tirana used ArcGIS Online to develop seven critical apps that helped citizens, city staff, and other decision-makers find emergency facilities, record damages to buildings, and figure out which areas of town needed the most immediate attention.\r\n\r\n\u201cOur solutions were the first ones that were developed and sent, very quickly, to the staff managing the emergency,\u201d said Olli.\r\n\r\nIn the hours, days, and weeks after the initial earthquake, as powerful and frequent aftershocks continued to rock the region, these location-based apps made all the difference."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

Four Apps Help Get Response Effort Off the Ground<\/h2>\r\nThe first thing the City of Durr\u00ebs needed was a map that showed all its emergency facilities."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":326531,"image_position":"left","orientation":"vertical","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"\u201cAlbania\u2019s emergency management capacity at the local level is extremely limited,\u201d explained Andrej Lon\u010dari\u0107, managing director of GDi in Croatia. \u201cThere was no public website that citizens could reach out to to get this information.\u201d\r\n\r\nCity staff gave the team point data for its critical buildings, including hospitals, police and fire stations, and first aid centers. Straightaway, Jupe, Olli, and their colleague Enxhi Masha, GDi Tirana\u2019s product and solutions implementation specialist, built a web app to help citizens and emergency responders locate these facilities and prioritize where to send the wounded.\r\n\r\nNext, the team contacted one of their partners, European Space Imaging, based in Munich, Germany, to obtain very high-resolution imagery of Durr\u00ebs taken early that morning. Using the Esri Story Maps Swipe and Spyglass app template, the team built another web app that let users swipe new imagery onto old imagery to see which buildings had collapsed.\r\n\r\nGDi Tirana also put together a Survey123 for ArcGIS form that citizens could use on their smartphones to quickly report damage to buildings. The idea was to get a broad overview of the devastation in Durr\u00ebs and figure out where the worst damage was, so the form was simple. It asked respondents to record their name; phone number; the geolocation of the building they were reporting on; whether damage was low, medium, or high; any relevant photos; which village and\/or administrative unit the building was in; and any additional relevant information.\r\n\r\nTo ensure that authorities responding to the emergency could see what was happening on the ground and use that information to make decisions, Jupe, Olli, and Masha used ArcGIS Dashboards to build a real-time dashboard that consolidated all the data that citizens were recording with Survey123 into a map, charts, and graphs."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":326521,"image_position":"right","orientation":"vertical","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"\u201cWe developed the dashboard together with the Municipality of Durr\u00ebs. [Staff] told us what to change and what to add,\u201d said Olli. \u201cWe made it available in both English and Albanian so it would be understandable by all the people involved.\u201d\r\n\r\nBy 9:00 a.m. the morning of the earthquake, Jupe, Olli, and Masha delivered these three apps to the City of Durr\u00ebs. Staff posted the critical facilities map and the Survey123 form on the city\u2019s website so citizens could easily find them and made all the apps available to other responding authorities, including the City of Tirana, the ministries of defense and the interior, and the national civil protection agency. By noon, all four apps were in full use.\r\n\r\n\u201cIt was very important to have tools like the ones that we built in the early hours, as the situation was unfolding, to help, in real time, with gathering quality information and creating quality tools,\u201d said Jupe."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

A More Detailed Way to Prioritize Needs and Resources<\/h2>\r\nOver the next few days, GDi Tirana focused on refining the data being collected in the field and presenting a more detailed picture to authorities. This involved working not only with the City of Durr\u00ebs but also with other specialists who descended on the region to help with response efforts.\r\n\r\nOne of the first groups that deployed to Albania following the earthquake was a team of engineers from the Israeli Home Front Command, the emergency response and civil protection branch of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The engineers were tasked with helping Durr\u00ebs and other communities survey buildings and classify their structural damage."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":326511,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"\u201cThey saw immediately that the City [of Durr\u00ebs] was using the tools that we had built,\u201d said Jupe. \u201cThey were happy about that because they also use the ArcGIS platform for their emergency management operations.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThey introduced us to the concept of sensitivity, or pain, mapping,\u201d said Olli. This is what the IDF uses to prioritize needs and resources. \u201cIt\u2019s a combination of different types of data layered on top of one another, and each one is given a certain amount of weight, based on a calculation, which, at the end, provides a more complex overview of the situation,\u201d explained Jupe. \u201cYou can combine these different types of data and, through mathematical formulas, better understand what\u2019s going on in the field and prioritize what you need to do.\u201d\r\n\r\nLess than two weeks after the initial earthquake struck, on December 8 at 11:00 p.m., the GDi team met with engineers from the Israeli Home Front Command to learn more about the concept of pain mapping, which is part of a system that won the Home Front Command a Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award at the 2019 Esri User Conference. The idea was to split up immediate issues into five categories, define whether each need was high or low, and then combine everything to show which areas of Durr\u00ebs had the highest sensitivity and needed the most immediate attention versus which areas could wait for assistance.\r\n\r\nThe five categories consisted of the following:\r\n