By: Vincent Sarago
Caribe Wave 2018 is a yearly international exercise, organized by UNESCO, to increase tsunami preparedness in the Caribbean Sea…and it’s happening today. As we’ve seen over the last few decades, earthquakes and their subsequent tsunamis pose a huge risk to populated areas and it pays to be prepared. For this year’s exercise, we’ve updated our satellite imagery of some Caribbean islands to help stakeholders create better risk assessments, plan evacuation routes, and more.
About 45 million people live on islands in the Caribbean Sea, with many more along its Central and South American coastlines. Geologically, the region centers on a small tectonic plate that’s active on every side. There are frequent small earthquakes and occasional large ones, like the magnitude 7.0 near Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 2010 — the volunteer response to that earthquake led to the formalization of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.
Recent location data is critical for disaster preparedness and response. With up-to-date imagery and elevation data, coastal communities can monitor infrastructure, map efficient escape routes, designate staging areas, and flag new at-risk developments. Proactive efforts like these help create geo-infrastructure that could save lives during a crisis.
The data we’ve added today is beautiful open aerial imagery from IGN, the French National Geographic Institute, under their Licence Ouverte. (Guadeloupe and Martinique are départments of France, which incidentally makes them the largest outposts of the European Union in the Americas!)
The data is now in mapbox.satellite, available for tracing in OpenStreetMap, and ready for everyday basemap use. Check out our guides to learn more about using imagery to add data to OpenStreetMap to contribute to disaster preparedness projects like Caribe Wave.
New imagery for Caribe Wave 2018 available was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.