59 Keeping Communities Safe There are so few transportation routes through the Australian Outback, making it critical to restore them after a disaster. The images captured by the remotely piloted aircraft were seamlessly stitched together using Site Scan for ArcGIS. Traditional mitigation efforts stood little chance of holding back the water in South Australia’s outback in January. In some cases, the force of the flooding shifted the concrete culverts that were meant to protect the rails. They hadn’t been designed to withstand such force because the amount of rainfall was unprecedented. The damage to Stuart Highway and the Trans-Australian Railway “virtually stopped everything in the country from moving around,” Moreland said. Traditional damage assessment imagery taken by piloted aircraft captured images but at far greater cost and with a less complete aerial view of the damage below. In contrast, the images captured by the remotely piloted aircraft were seamlessly stitched together using Site Scan for ArcGIS, a cloud-based tool that speeds up imagery processing and information sharing. The images were added to a dashboard that kept track of all the damage. The imagery, maps, and charts provided everyone in the region with the context they needed to understand the impacts. The information was relayed to the National Situation Room in Canberra, which needed evidence of damage to support relief and recovery planning. That, in turn, allowed for efforts such as the airlifting of supplies to stranded residents in Coober Pedy, the remote mining town that was completely cut off by the deluge.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjA2NTE0Mw==