A shifting of the tectonic plates beneath the city of Léogâne, some 15 kilometres south-west of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, on January 12th 2010 caused a severe earthquake, magnitude 7.2 on the Richter Scale.

The island of Haiti sits on the northern edge of one of the smallest of the world's tectonic plates, the Caribbean Plate, for the most part oceanic and underlying Central America and the Caribbean Sea. It is roughly 3.2 million square kilometres in area and borders the North American, the South American, the Nazca and the Cocos Plates. The edges of the Caribbean Plate feature regions of intense seismic activity, causing frequent earthquakes, occasional tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.

When manmade or natural disaster strikes, a wide range of geospatial intelligence saves lives. The damage renders people homeless and deprives them of water and food. Buildings collapse, blocking roads. Communication networks, water pipes and other infrastructure are disrupted. Aid becomes stranded at the airport. Since it is often impossible to assess the full impact of a disaster on the ground, aerial and satellite photographs of the present and past situation provide a major aid to disaster management. After earthquake, new imagery helps in the detection of day-to-day change and plays an important role as long as aftershocks continue. Reasonably new to the current scenario is that fast-gathered geographical information is available via easy-to-use viewers on the web.

Google and GeoEye, for example, have worked closely to make available GeoEye satellite imagery of Haiti as a KML overlay for Google Earth. You can download the KML (1) and open it in Google Earth, or view it via a browser plug-in. These GIM pages show a GeoEye half-meter resolution satellite image of the Toussaint L'Ouverture International Airport, Port-au-Prince. The image clearly shows multiple aircraft, supplies and personnel on the ground. The image was taken by the GeoEye-1 satellite at 10:37 a.m. EST on January 16, 2010. Another easy-to-use example is the ESRI Flex Viewer application that enables users to quickly pan around the globe and map a number of variables from various data feeds, including reports from the USGS earthquake monitoring stations. The map is now available through our website (second link below).