With thousands of victims still in the rubble after the devastating earthquake earlier this month, Haiti's priority is still search and rescue, but rebuilding is already being planned. To rebuild Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, the first step will be to survey the damage, then estimate what is needed for, and where to start, reconstruction. To aid in that effort, the World Bank has funded a five-day mission to map the damage, detect any remaining fires, show possible chemical spills, and identify surface contamination on lakes and ponds.

The technique repurposes a system created by the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) for the U.S. Forest Service to spot wildfires with high-resolution color cameras and infrared thermal imaging cameras. For the Haiti survey, the RIT system has been integrated with a laser range finder (Lidar) from disaster management specialist ImageCat (Long Beach, Calif.). By integrating the two systems, a complete 3D rendering of the devastated area will be possible on a topographical map. Lidar uses laser pulses to measure 3D depth, which will be tagged simultaneously with the color and infrared image capturing steps so that a composite topographical map can be accurately rendered.

The survey is using a Piper Navajo plane operated by aerial mapping company Kucera International (Lakeland, Fla.) and outfitted with the color camera, infrared camera and Lidar range finder. The plane flies at 3,000 feet in a raster-scan like pattern that covers the entire area affected by the earthquake in narrow swaths. The imagery is then stitched together into a complete 3D topographical map with annotations that provide information about the locations of dangerous hot spots, chemical contaminants, leaking containers and precarious structures that need to be torn down.

After each pass over the area, the data is uploaded to the Rochester Institute of Technology, where scientists and graduate students are working 24/7 at its Information Products Laboratory for Emergency Response (IPLER)—a partnership between RIT and the University of Buffalo. After integrating the color, infrared and Lidar depth information into a single topographical map, the data is being posted online for viewing with the University of Buffalo's Virtual Disaster Viewer application. The maps are being hosted by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, the United Nations, the U.S. Geological Survey and The Earth to Business Company.

The 3D topographical maps will subsequently be used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the U.S. Geological Survey, and several non-governmental organizations that will assist with the reconstruction efforts. The U.S. Geological Survey has also requested that the Lidar system be used to map the fault line to determine how much it has moved since the quake, which will assist in estimating the possibility of future earthquakes in the area.