Following the severe earthquake in Mexico on 19 September 2017, the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) joined forces for the first time with the non-profit aid organisation I.S.A.R. to support the rescue and safety work that quickly got underway. During an eight-day mission, a team in Mexico City and the state of Morelos examined the stability and habitability of more than one hundred buildings. A DLR employee provided aerial photographs on site, which helped to assess the damage to the buildings. It was the first joint mission by DLR and I.S.A.R.
Aerial photographs provide a time advantage
In November 2016, the two partners signed a cooperation agreement on collaboration in disaster situations. Since then, three experts from the DLR Institute of Optical Sensor Systems have been preparing intensively for real operations in regular joint exercises with I.S.A.R. Germany. "With our camera systems, we can contribute to the exploration of damaged areas. In an emergency, this can provide crucial and life-saving time advantages," says Ralf Berger, Project Manager at the DLR Institute of Optical Sensor Systems. Another important goal of the co-operation is the development of new technologies that can be used to create large-scale situational pictures after major disasters.
Assess the extent of the damage
Due to the short duration of the quake in Mexico, fortunately only a few houses were completely destroyed and the infrastructure was not extensively affected. Accordingly, the main focus of the DLR and I.S.A.R. Germany mission was the assessment of damaged buildings. "Due to the size and partial inaccessibility of the buildings, we supported the construction experts from I.S.A.R. Germany with close-up images of damaged building structures," says DLR scientist Steven Bayer, part of the team on site in Mexico. "With the real-time images, the construction experts were able to assess whether the building was still stable or habitable," adds the scientist. A commercially available small UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) was used for this purpose. Bayer also took a series of drone photos of typical building damage after an earthquake. "These will be used for training and further education after the mission," explains Marcus Zinser, construction expert at I.S.A.R. Germany.
Successful first mission
"This first mission has shown that the collaboration between DLR and I.S.A.R. Germany can significantly support disaster relief," says Dr Dennis Göge, Programme Coordinator for Security Research at DLR. "We are continuing to work on new technologies that are specifically designed for use in such cases of damage," he explains. One example is the high-resolution MACS-SaR camera system, which allows an area of damage to be explored from the air even before search and rescue teams are deployed. The system was developed by DLR and successfully tested in May 2017 as part of a UN exercise.