Use of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Technologies in Disaster Management, especially Earthquakes

Abstract

With each passing day, catastrophe risk for urban regions of the world is increasing. One of these catastrophes is the earthquake and recent events in Northridge and Kobe were typical examples of what can happen when a major earthquake strikes directly under a densely populated area. Mega cities created by the rapid urbanization and development in unsafe areas led to far greater losses experienced in the past. In order to reduce the property losses after an earthquake a quick repair process is a major task. This process must be based on detailed plans for rebuilding or strengthening procedures of the buildings. The major damage loss is caused by earthquakes.

Geodetic science plays an important role in the earthquake research. By means of long-term measurement, deformations caused by the breakage of the earth crust caused by the moving plates can be examined. Photogrammetry and Information System techniques are new tools in the earthquake research. Terrestrial photogrammetric methods have been used for the first time to document the damages after an earthquake in Friaul, Italy. There are many attempts to use photogrammetry, remote sensing and information sciences in the earthquake damaged areas. Some of them are related with the earthquake prediction, long and short term, some of them is related to the damage recording and assessment. A similar study to this research is the work after the Kobe earthquake.

In all these studies they claim of data collection as well as before or after an earthquake. Earlier earthquakes revealed problems in the processes of documenting and analyzing the building damage that occurred due to earthquake disasters which demanded much effort in terms of time and man power. The main difficulties appeared because analogue damage assessments created a great variety of unstructured information that had to be put in a line to allow further analysis. Apart from that, documentation of damage effects was not detailed and could only be carried out on the spot of a disaster.