There's a lot of stuff I've passed on blogging lately. I just wanted to say that I am as interested as anyone else in what became of people in the path of Hurricane Wilma, the Bush administration as we know it lurching towards its unhappy ending, and whether Judy Miller keeps her job. And I have a couple of blog posts of interest to me personally on other subjects saved up for when I get a moment. (I did manage to get out a cute kid post.)

When the tsumani hit, I thought it was the disaster with the largest number of casualties in my lifetime. I looked into the matter and was deeply ashamed that I didn't even recognize the name of the Tangshan earthquake.

Mostly what I've been on about is trying somehow to convey the urgency of a situation in which over three million people are living without a roof over their heads, of whole cities with many injured without a single surgeon available to help, of winter weeks away.

The easy way out is to think that there's just nothing you can do. But that isn't the case. And yes, giving money is nice, but those red plus signs do not rain down upon the afflicted adding to their hit points allowing them to survive. The situation is much more complex than that.

And you know it, don't you?

If nothing else, bloggers can keep it on the front pages, which keeps up the stream of aid donations. But the whole surround in which two countries hold in reserve the possibility of firey death for everyone involved, i.e. a nuclear war between two heavily populated counties, and that this is the excuse of stymied relief efforts just has to be over. The degree of abandonment by the international community these people are experiencing is something that should not hapen to anyone anytime anywhere.

This isn't just about counties far away full of people you would never have met anyway. This is the modus opperandi of the 20th century right there in our faces if we care to see it. This is the Ghost of Cold Wars Past come back to haunt us.

What happens next matters. Try to save them.

I am delighted to pass on the following message from Randy Sargent of the Global Connection Project:

We've put online some new Pakistan earthquake overlays for Google Earth at http://jaga.gc.cs.cmu.edu/rapid/pakistan/

Version 1 features: Includes 10 images from Center for Satellite Based Crisis Information; Images broken into 2K x 2K chunks for high-resolution display in Google Earth

We're hoping to put up additional images from mapaction.org today, followed by a dynamic overlay tomorrow.

Here are a few of screen shots:

Have at it!

A little less than an hour ago, there was a 6.0 earthquake in Pakistan [Sunday, October 23, 2005 at 15:04:21 (UTC)] at 34.880°N, 73.030°E, about 85 miles north of Islamabad. (Here's the AP story.)

MEANWHILE, here's another interesting piece from Indian seismologist Arun Bapat, on the potential for using cell phone technology to as a warning system for precursors of big earthquakes: Cellphone can warn of earthquake.

From the MapAction blog, David Spackman reporting from Pakistan delivers this horrificly dry passage:

Tonight we produced a map that shows the provision of tentage across the districts. These statistics (best estimates) tell us that the requirement for tents is 455,726 and tents delivered is 62,075.  A huge discrepancy and an indication of the magnitude of the task facing the relief effort.

The MapAction relief team is based in Islamabad.

10/23 UPDATE from The New York Times this morning:

On Friday morning, more than 100 men, wrapped in shawls, showing the signs of 13 nights spent outside, stood politely in line for a tent. Syed Tasneem Shah said he had come here every day for the last 10 days. He had a 1-year-old baby to care for. His wife and elder daughter were dead, his mother badly wounded. "They just say, wait, it will come today, it will come tomorrow," Mr. Shah recounted. He waited another day.

Clark Boyd's Tech report for The World (BBC/WGBH) has a podcast of the show from the other day, and the podcast (Tech Podcast #55) is much longer than the original show. Let me start by saying that this podcast is a Must-Listen for Google Earth enthusiasts. Yes, it has clips of me sounding really intelligent at the beginning, but that's not the part I'm talking about.

The part you need to hear is the interview from Anne Wright, of  Global Connection -- a collaboration between the NASA Ames Research Center, Google, and National Geographic -- which was too long and info-dense for the original BBC/WGBH broadcast, but which outlines the vision behind some of the perks Google Earth users are currently enjoying, and what can be done with this technology and others out there on the market.

She talks about the origins of the Global Connection project, the National Geographic project, how Global Connection came to process thousands of images NOAA from Katrina and Rita for Google Earth overlays, how she and I came to work together on the earthquake project, and her vision of how things could work in the future. It's packed with really great stuff!

I drafted the following material about a week ago as part of a much longer essay on the possibilities of using maps over the internet for disaster rellief. Some of it drawns upon material from previous blog entries of mine. It was written before I thought there was a realistic possibility of integrating SMS phone information into maps I helped create. Now, if we can get the world out to those who need to know about the SMS Quake blog, we are much closer to the reality of that.

The context of the following passage is that when the earthquake hit, I was at the Wolfram Technology Conference in Champaign, Illinois. So I kept buttonholing smart techies to ask for advice on how what I was doing mightbe done better.

Some of the most interesting suggestions came from Luc Barthelet of Electronic Arts who had come to do a presentation on prototyping the game SimCity in Mathematica. We talked about the utility of having layers of data on the existence or non-existence of building codes, on the relative heights and ages of the buildings. And then he made what I thought was the best suggestion of all, though it probably can’t be implemented this time out: set up a phone number such that people can phone in pictures and information associated with specific coordinates; do this in such a way that it automatically annotates the map. I thought this was a truly visionary suggestion for several reasons.

First of all, some of the best personal reportage from the tsunami had been sent in by people writing on their cell phones and cell phones are a much more ubiquitous technology in the 3rd World than desktop computers with Internet connections. But more important, it seemed to me, was the beautifully humanizing aspect of such a technological innovation. He was proposing that we given disaster victims and relief workers voices, faces, proposing that we be able to see through their eyes.

Traditionally, the view from above—the narrative point of view of satellite or aerial photo—is military, that of the bomber pilot: You look at people that way when you think it might be okay to kill them en mass. One of the effects of having spent weeks scrutinizing aerial and satellite photos for people wanting information about their homes, their families, their pets, is that I am now longer able to look at aerial photos of damage in the same way. It has become much more personalized. I experience it as a stripping away of a twentieth century attitude of abstract detachment, an attitude that the legacy of World War II and the Cold War encouraged.

A few weeks ago, a Japanese fellow who is my age and goes by the handle of Earthhopper was testing out Google Earth's newly added images of Hiroshima and discovered an odd lack of clarity in the area of the Hiroshima memorial, the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome.

To correct this oversight, Earthhopper has used the same techniques that Shawn MacBride and the Google Earth Current Events community used to superimpose images of the New Orleans levee breaks upon satellite images, but this time on Hiroshima, superimposing photos of the devastated land on the overly-fuzzy Google Earth view of modernday Hiroshima. His photo caption read,

Image overlay of Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Dome, taken in 1945. The atomic bomb hit the city on Aug 6, 1945 and killed more than 140,000 people on the day, 240,000+ listed as of now.

Earthhopper and I were both born in 1962. He is the son of a physician. I am the daughter of a nuclear physicist, though of the generation after the Manhattan project and who has never worked on weapons research. This lead to some interesting correspondence. Upon seeing his Hiroshima overlays, I wrote,

Each and every one of those several hundred thousand people had a name and a face and a life story. We have been encouraged to distance ourselves from this kind of information, encouraged to be overwhelmed by it. But is that just the way we are, or is it a political construct of the twentieth century? Can we get beyond it? It seems to me that this technique has broad applications in historical photography and in helping us forge a new psychological relationship with history.

What Luc Barthelet was proposing was even more radical and more humanizing: to give voice to those in distress that the 20th century view of the world gives up for dead while they are still alive.

Meanwhile, my CommunityWalk Earthquake Map information can now be exported to a Google Earth overlay. Go to the map, click on the brown "Share" button at the lower right of the map, then click on the brown "Google Earth" button that appears in same corner.

South Asia Quake Help has set up a blog that accepts posts from SMS phones. (For my futher thoughts on the potential of this, listen to my BBC interview aired this afternoon.)

We now have updates via SMS on a new blog, http://smsquake.blogspot.com. Anyone can post there. That means you.

To post to this blog, at present, you will need a phone that can send SMSes (text messages) to an email address. Send your updates to sms2blog AT gmail DOT com

We're working on a method by which you will be able to send updates to a cellphone number. We hope to have a number from Pakistan to which you can send your messages to be relayed to this blog.

Anyone who'd like to volunteer the use of their phone number for this purpose, please email quakehelp AT gmail DOT com.

A little later they posted this heartening update:

. . . we now have a cellphone number in place in Pakistan. So, to send messages that will appear on http://smsquake.blogspot.com,

You can mail sms2blog AT gmail DOT com

or

You can send an SMS to Imran Hashmi at +923008568418.

Please give your location and name in your message.

MEANWHILE, this is the letter I sent to the Public Editor at the New York Times this morning:

Dear Byron Calame:

This morning the BBC reports, "The UN says the Asia quake aid situation is worse than last December's tsunami and calls for a massive airlift." But the entire matter has fallen completely off the front page of the New York Times website. To scan down the NYT front page just now is to see a world in which the earthquake never happened.

Surely, the Times is aware of the severity of the situation? Some crucial line of communication between the NYT and the public is broken here. Please fix it.

Sincerely,

Kathryn Cramer

NYT UPDATE 10/21/05: This is a little more like it!

The story has since allen off the front page of the NYT web edition, butis featured prominently on the newstand print edition.

The Daily Times in Pakistan has this completely boggling line in the leadup to one of its articles:

UN says not enough tents in the world for survivors

Here's a screen shot of the page so you can get the full flavor:

In some of these places, it gets cold at night at this time of year. People's houses were destroyed; they have only the clothes on their backs. I have been looking at Mapaction.org's situation map dated yesterday and while it provides useful informtaion, what I find most notable is what isn't there. There is much too little information for the population density.

This morning, there were two aftershocks (see also this link) in the area of Allai Tehsil, where a Mapaction map says that there are 44 villages; one aftershock measured 5.6 on the Richter scale, the other 5.8, (not to mention a 5.2 that I just noticed a few miles away). South Asian Media Net has a chilling story entitled All roads to Balakot, what of the others. It discusses the area I just mentioned:

Pasho, Tandool, Jambera, Gateela, Bathkool and Banna areas in Allai tehsil were not approached by the rescuers and relief organizations.

You've probably never heard of Allai Tehsil. Neither had I. Except I've been looking at a small area of aftershocks I've come to refer to as the "Eggtooth Quadrant." And I wanted to know whether the area was inhabited and what the population density is/was. I call it that because watching the aftershocks come in on the USGS list is like watching a baby chick trying to peck its way out of an egg. As I remarked on October 9th, "It's like a set-up for a Japanese monster movie: what ever's in there has got an awfully big egg tooth!" At the time I wrote that, there had been 19 earthquakes in a fairly small area. As I write this, there have been twenty-nine aftershocks in the quadrant defined by the coordinates 34.865, 72.974), (34.865,73.302), (34.56, 72.974), (34.56, 73,302); 26 of which are 5.0 and up, the largest at 6.3.

This screen shot doesn't show scale, but some of these epicenters are walking-distance apart. Purple = 4.0 - 4.9; turquoise = 5.0 - 5.9; blue (1L) is 6.0 - 6., in this case a 6.3. The brown marker is a village or town I can see on the satellite image. I don't have a name. On the population map I'm looking at, Allai Tehsil (44 villages ) is about where marker 17 is [Magnitude 5.6 Date-Time Wednesday, October 19, 2005 at 03:16:21 (UTC)]

I have yet to see an earthquake damage map that takes these aftershocks into account. Because of lack of communications, it is hard to know whet the effect is there: At very least, these aftershocks have been discouraging people from occupying what buildings remained standing after the big quake; this in a situation where there is little in the way of alternative shelter and at least in some parts no aid is flowing in, meaning few if any tents. Also, this area  grades upwards into the mountains. In a piece I blogged a while back, Indian seismologist Arun Bapat remarks, "Seismic vibrations have more amplitude at higher elevations." What can this mean about the impact of these aftershocks on the local population?

MEANWHILE, from the areas with which it is possible to be in contact, I have received a set of photos from The Citizens Foundation, which I have postd on my Flickr account.

Also, from Rehan of Super Technologies Inc., Pensacola, Florida, I received the following note:

We have created a small portal for interconnecting different organisations who are trying to help in Pakistan to different people, Please have a look at it, and let others  know about it.

Again the aim is to be more organised using the net and telephony as much as we  can. site is www.pakistancare.org and a tiki is on www.pakistancare.org/tiki

It has been 3 days only since we started it so its not really the best, but we are trying our best and are open to suggestions.

Today, the official death toll has risen to 79,000. I expect it to go much higher, given the extent to which affected areas have not yet been reached and the living conditions of the survivors. Think about it: Not enough tents in the world.

Meanwhile, the entire matter has fallen almost completely off the front page of the New York Times website. To scan down their front page just now is to see a world in which the earthquake never happened. There is a tiny squib about "Pride and Politics After Quake." I missed it the first time through.

10/20 UPDATE: From the front page of the BBC site (which hasn't forgotten that there was an earthquake):

Declan Butler's latest article in Nature about Pakistan disaster relief and the availability of satellite photography is up:

UN opens access to earthquake shots: Relief workers applaud release of satellite imagery.

High-resolution satellite images of Kashmir, which was hit hard by a magnitude-7.6 earthquake on 8 October, have begun to reappear on public websites, much to the relief of aid workers.

The pictures were removed last week from all public-access websites belonging to the United Nations (UN) and its relief partners, including the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters (see 'Quake aid hampered by ban on web shots').

A senior official at the charter, who asked not to be named, told Nature that the UN decided to ban public dissemination of photos of the area after a meeting on 10 October. The official told Nature that the meeting discussed an official reminder from Pakistan about the political sensitivity of the area, which was issued after the earthquake. Pakistan and India have long fought over Kashmir, and there were concerns that pictures could compromise security in the region.

Tasnim Aslam, a spokeswoman for Pakistan's foreign ministry, told Associated Press in Islamabad yesterday that "No one in the Pakistan government has made a request that such maps be removed." Nature's sources emphasize that the UN decision was a precaution against a deterioration in relations with Pakistan.

After pressure from relief groups seeking wider access to the images, the UN met again on 17 October, and reversed its decision. It sent a memo to all involved parties on the morning of Tuesday 18 October advising them that the ban on photos had been lifted.  . . .

The lifting of the ban is "wonderful news", says Anne Wright, a computer scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. Wright was involved in mapping the damage done by Hurricane Katrina and knows how useful such images can be.

She is part of the Global Connection, a consortium made up of Google and scientists at Ames and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, which is now scrambling to access the public images. The group hopes to produce maps of the Pakistan earthquake zone that are more detailed than those currently available.

Such Internet responses to disasters by diverse groups will "make responses to similar events in the future easier and more efficient", says Wright.

Now the big job is to go through all the stuff that just went up to find the images that are both good enough and relevant. Some are going to be good: no clouds, good atmospheric conditions; some are going to relevant, i.e. pictures of the places that need to be seen. We hope for  images that are both.

MEANWHILE, Nathan Newman reports on how Senator Diane Feinstein has "just introduced legislation to undermine what is known as the Alien Tort Claims Act, an old law dating back to the first years of the Republic that has been revived in recent years by human rights activists to hold corporations responsible for their actions in developing nations."

Taking a page from FEMA's playbook, Pakistan has apparently found a startling way to hinder relief efforts for quake victims: Block access to satellite images for the affected area in the interests of its national security. Surely a place like Pakistan would not replicate the kinds of mistakes made here in the US by the US government in the face of the Katrina disaster?

My little maps project, which had as its lofty goal getting useful maps into the hands of those doing disaster relief in Pakistan, merged Thursday morning with efforts by The Citizens Foundation (an aid organization in Pakistan) to get maps to its relief workers. This new consortium succeeded in getting high-rez maps into the hands of relief workers on the ground in Muzaffarabad by the 15th.

It turns out that this was accomplished despite a UN ban on the posting of hi-rez photos of Pakistan on the Internet (which we did not know about), apparently out of consideration for Pakistan's concerns about it's national security interests. We had a very hard time getting the images into the hands of those who could produce the necessary maps, but ultimately it was accomplished.

I emailed Declan Butler, a reporter at Nature, about this, mentioning the problems we were having getting images. He checked into this. This turns out to be because there was a United Nations ban issued on posting such images on the Internet. Declan Butler, tracked it down and wrote about the situation in a Nature story posted early this morning:

Quake aid hampered by ban on web shots:

Open-access satellite images are revolutionizing responses to disasters. Yet the government of Pakistan has forced aid agencies to remove pictures of earthquake devastation from the Internet.

Three days after the 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck Kashmir on 8 October, the Pakistan government appealed for high-resolution satellite images to help relief efforts. But, apparently to protect national security, Nature has learned that the government has since forced international agencies and relief organizations to remove these images from their websites.

The International Charter on Space and Major Disasters put high-resolution images of the earthquake zone on its website last Friday, then pulled them off hours later. The charter, a consortium of space agencies, was created in 2000 to supply satellite images and data to communities in need of relief following a disaster.

An International Charter spokesperson said: "To best aid relief efforts, we are no longer publicly disseminating pictures of the Pakistan earthquake. Publication of such images would compromise the ability of United Nations (UN) forces on the ground to deliver relief. We hope you understand the situation."

But a senior official at the charter, who asked not to be named, says that the Pakistan government had demanded that no photos be made accessible to the public, because it feared the images could compromise security in the Kashmir region - an area that has long been disputed territory between India and Pakistan. The UN and other aid agencies need Pakistan's cooperation on the ground, and had no choice but to comply, he says.

An hour or two after the story appeared on the Nature site, (which is to say some time in the past few hours) the UN lifted the ban on posting good satellite images of Pakistan.

I hadn't psychologically adjusted to the fact that we really got the maps there in the first place when I read Declan's story this morning, which explained that "the Pakistan government had demanded that no photos be made accessible to the public, because it feared the images could compromise security in the Kashmir region." If the earthquake disaster isn't a pressing issue of Pakistan's national security, then I don't know what is.

Where is Michael Brown now? I guess now we know. But seriously, what were they thinking???

Now that the dam of secrecy has broken and the publically held images will be allowed out, here is where images both public and privately held can be found:

the EU JRC will probably have among the most extensive collections.

Unosat is the UN clearing house for relief images.

The International Charter "Space and Major Disasters"

DigitalGlobe has at the moment limited recent images because of cloud and rain, and Google is already working with them.

Spaceimaging.com has good images; it charges NGOs a fee, but also sells it to the US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

Let me explain one place in which the system is broken. The publically held images were withdrawn from circulation. The business model of the private companies is that NGOs [Non-Governmental Organization] have to pay a fee because some government or munificently funded charity somewhere is picking up the tab for the aid provided. If the UN orders that photos not be posted on the Internet, then who is going to foot the bill for the NGOs to get the pictures? Got it?  (Also, I gather that some of the private companies holding photos were observing the UN ban.)

SEE ALSO, Ogle Earth: Pakistan hampers aid efforts by banning high-resolution imagery:

That's a whole week in which aid was needlessly hampered, but at least reason prevailed in the end.

UPDATE: Not wanting to be left behind in the competition for pig-headedness, India apparently takes strong exception to us being able to look in on things in Kashmir. From  the Times of India:

Google earth under govt scrutiny

NEW DELHI: What was till recently an alarm on the fringes is fast developing into a mainstream worry. One day after President A P J Abdul Kalam placed on record the country’s growing concern about the threat posed by free satellite images, the science and technology ministry said that the government has started taking steps in this regard.

Speaking to The Times of India, science and technology secretary V S Ramamoorthy said, 'What is a matter of great concern is the sufficient resolution provided by the satellite images on Google Earth posing a security threat to various installations'.

At the moment, the ministry, in close coordination with other security agencies, is evaluating the images of the sensitive locations, he said.

The whole world is watching. Are you for people? Or do you priviledge other things above human lives? To both governments, that is really the question.

Given that the UN ban was lifted, I suspect that both governments decided to do the right thing.

I'm taking in more information than I can blog right now. Each of these deserves its own several paragraph writeup. So, in no particular order:

• A baby girl is born to a woman, rescued from an earthquake-devastated village, in a refugee camp run by The Citizen's Foundation, the organization I helped get the maps they need. From the Daily Times in Pakistan:
  

  

• A call for Internet Technology volunteers to do disaster relief in Pakistan.

The one weak thread through all of this (earthquake relief) has been project management or the lack of it, simply due to the enormity of the task at hand. As a community that specializes in automating and improving the processes involved in running businesses and government, it would be a shame if we could not help streamline the relief activities and make them more effective.

P@SHA has therefore offered its assistance to the PM’s Secretariat and Relief Cell. We are putting together a team of experts who will analyze the needs of the relief organizations
including the government, the army and the NGOs etc and will link it all up to provide some sort of cohesive approach to the activities thus saving a lot of time and increasing the pace of relief activities.

In the process we will need expertise of varying types:

Hardware Installation & Maintenance
Networking
Wireless Communication Installation, Deployment &
Maintenance
System Analysts
Project Managers
ASP.NET/HTML developers
PHP developers
Java developers
SQL servers developers
mySQL developers
Graphic/Interface designers
Data Entry people
People for Information Gathering
Content creation/development/management specialists
Communication specialists able to deal with
telecom/satellite equipment

Some of the volunteers may be required to work in their respective cities, others may be asked to work in Islamabad or at the relief sites in the northern areas. Please do therefore
specify where you are stationed and whether you will be available or able to relocate to any of the sites if necessary and for what period of time.

P@SHA will be working with various IT and telecom organizations. Some of them including Intel have already volunteered equipment and connectivity. We are also working with Shahida Saleem and Azhar Rizvi on implementing telemedicine in the affected areas.

Please indicate your interest or those of your employees by sending an email to [email protected]. I would appreciate it if you would circulate this email to your team.

Please circulate this email to anyone that you feel would be able to assist.
Jehan Ara

• Declan Butler, a reporter at Nature who seems to be a bottomless well of helpful links, has sent me his excellent Connotea list with many, many good disaster links.

• I've posted lots and lots of photos from Capclave last weekend, held in Silver Spring, Maryland. Here is the link to the Capclave photos. Guests of honor Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden pulled in a hefty portion of interesting bloggers. Here are the photos of bloggers. Dramatis personnae: Patrick & Teresa, Avedon Carol, Jeri Smith-Ready, Rivka, Jim Henley, & Henry Farrell. (Links to their sites are on the photo pages.)

This is a photograph, one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, is a photo of a high-resolution printed map that emerged from a collective Internet-based attempt to get rescue workers in Pakistan the detailed maps they need in which I played a minor role: we did it. This map was sent to Pakistan early this morning. It will save lives. (This is not a press photo.)

Another thing I find very moving is that this morning, when I checked on my CommunityWalk Pakistan Earthquake site, I saw that someone had created a CommunityWalk map entitled "Lahore,"  (31.56, 74.35, i.e. in the earthquake zone) which has the subtitle "beautiful Lahore." It consists only of a satellite view of the city of Lahore, Pakistan, in the quake zone about 120 miles south of the epicenter, population  5,997,200.

MEANWHILE, Thierry Rousselin, in Paris, writes:

If you read french, here is a link to our blog where you will find examples of Formosat 2 images over Abbotabad (main hospital 45 km away from the epicenter).

http://geo212.blogs.com/geospatial_air_du_temps_b/2005/10/images_pakistan.html

About your comment on the lack of answer from the RS companies in a timely manner, I can understand NGO people's frustration after the incredible amount of quality data received after Katrina and Rita.

But to get good images over northern Pakistan is not easy. On sunday at 9:30 local time, there is a big cloud over Muzaffarabad. Fortunately, two hours later, when Ikonos comes, the cloud has moved a few miles and they get a good image. On monday, the sky is almost clear and the area coverage is good with Spot and Formosat 2. But during the week, meteo conditions worsen and it's pretty difficult to get a nice image.

So good timing in the distribution is also based on the number of good available images.

And Declan Butler, also in Paris, sent me a useful link to a different page in the USGS site than the one I've been frequenting: USGS Earthquakes: Earthquake Catalogs

In addition to web-based maps and html pages, USGS provides several alternative ways to obtain real-time, worldwide earthquake lists. Earthquake information is extracted from a merged catalog of earthquakes located by the USGS and contributing networks.

This page his links to things like earthquake RSS feeds, and KML files.

The Global Disaster Alert System has put up a page of great information on the impact of the Pakistan Earthquake.

Especially interesting, for those doing Google mashup maps is this page which allow you to superimpose tectonic, population density, and other information on the map of Pakistan.

(Via Declan Butler.)

Declan Butler, an editor at Nature, has sent me links to some really good imagery of the Pakistan Earthquake zone:

• "This one-meter resolution image of Pakistani Kashmir was taken by Space Imaging's IKONOS satellite October 9, 2005. The death toll from the 7.6 magnitude earthquake that struck Asia Saturday has climbed to more than 30,000."
  http://www.spaceimaging.com/
• NASA have just posted some
  http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/natural_hazards_v2.php3?img_id=13192

Also, the International Charter Space and Major Disasters photos are up and I see for the first time a good shot of the epicenter with the names of cities and towns superimposed. This is what death looks like:

Muzaffarabad, now referred to as "The City of Death," had a population of 700,000. I notice that my map's comment system now being used. Here are the comments associated with my marker for Muzaffarabad:

UPDATE: I'm told by a relief oganization on the ground in Pakistan that some of the companies holding these useful satellite images are not responding to inquiries in a timely manner. Come on guys! Get with the program. Relief agencies need maps to save lives and they need them yesterday!

From the Indian Express: Kids die in chill, parents say give us sweaters, not food

URI, TANGDHAR, NEW DELHI, OCTOBER 11: Tonight is the third consecutive night under an open sky and Dardkote has lost another child to the rain and the cold. This takes the toll of children killed by the night chill to seven across the quake-hit villages here. Everyone here is afraid that number will rise given that the season’s first snow has begun to fall.

According to the Met forecast for the next 72 hours for Baramulla and Badgam districts, the rain will continue. Both the minimum and maximum temperatures are going to fall by nearly a degree each day. Minimum temperatures are already touching 7 degrees Celsius and are expected to fall further.

This is because of a western disturbance over Pakistan and although the low pressure area is weakening, it is likely to impact the area for the next few days.

So parents desperately want just one thing: tents for shelter and warm clothes, sweaters, for their shivering children.

Pakistan has about 2 percent of the world's population living on less than 0.7 percent of the world's land.

Q: What portion of the world's population lives in areas affected by the earthquake? How can you tell? How many of those are under age 18?

Show your work.

Extra credit: What is the population density in the most severely affected areas?

ALSO, there is a fascinating piece by an Indian seismologist, Arun Bapat, about what is to be learned from this earthquake tragedy, including some risk factors to that population your trying to do math about that might not have occurred to you:

. . . let us examine the fate of conventional structures. Press reports and television coverage indicate that there has been extensive damage in the mountainous areas of this region. The area in the vicinity of earthquake epicentre is situated at an altitude of 2,000 to 3,000 meters. Seismic vibrations have more amplitude at higher elevations. For example, take a 30-storeyed building. It will have the least vibrations at the level of the ground floor but, as you go higher, the amplitude of the vibrations increase. The earthquake damage in Baramulla, Uri, Poonch, and so on, which are located at heights of about 1,500 to 2000 metres, and at a distance of about 60 to 90 km from the epicentre, was therefore more severe, as compared to the damage at Islamabad or Haripur, which are at a distance of about 60 to 90 km, but situated at an elevation of about 500 metres or so.

Follow the link to the Indian Express news story, "Is there anybody out there?" It is the first one I've seen to give any account of what I've suspected was going on in the quake-ravaged hills.

Even in the fuzzy Digital Globe satellite images from 1999 -- the best I could get of the region over the internet -- it is apparent on my nice large monitor that the mountainsides are terraced with farmlands, and their creases are dotted with small white rectangles suggestive of roofs. There were people down there.

From the Daily Times of Pakistan, this is just too sad:

NEW DELHI: Even as a top Indian government official rushes to Washington to put India on the Global Seismographic Network so it is better informed of earthquakes, Kapil Sibal, the Indian minister for science and technology, has ruled out the possibility of establishing any mechanism to share seismic data with Pakistan. He has a reason for keeping Pakistan at arm’s length, because the same seismic data that gives intensity and epicentre information can also reveal the exact location and intensity of any underground nuclear test.

These places are on huge fault zones. How many people have to die before they share data?

What the world needs is this: Desktop datamining capabilities so good that any 14-year-old in New Jersey who wants to know can tell who's doing nuclear testing and where.

Americans and Europeans
Answer honestly: How many of the following names of municipalities do you recognize and what do your guess their populations might be? Where are they?
NO PEEKING!

1. Lahore
2. Faisalabad
3. Rawalpindi
4. Multan
5. Hyderabad
6. Gujranwala
7. Peshawar
8. Quetta

One interesting result I obtain from my Community Walk earthquake site is that a small area, under 600 sq. Kilometers, is getting creamed by the "aftershocks," most over 5.0 on the Richter scale; one about 6.3. There were nineteen earth quakes in this small area over the course of a day and a half, someone with epicenters walking distance apart (at least as the crow flies). They average 5.45.

Amazing to watch. It's like a set-up for a Japanese monster movie: what ever's in there has got an awfully big egg tooth! Seriously though, what prior recorded examples like this are there?

I hope no one lived there.  I'm looking for a map indicating the relative population of areas like that. But big alert to what rescue operations are out there, get any people near there away, because this process doesn't look like it's done.

The USGS list of Asian quakes provides a longer list of quakes than the Wilber site I was working with previously. I don't know why that is.

Via DAWN, via   South Asia Quake Help:

Confirmed death toll in quake passes 1,800: officials ISLAMABAD, Oct 8 (AFP) The confirmed death toll in Saturday's massive earthquake, which rocked India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, has passed 1,800, officials said. "The death toll is between 550 and 600 in North West Frontier Province and it is likely to rise," Riffat Pasha, the provincial head of police said. Some 250 people were confirmed dead and thousands more injured in Muzaffarabad,a government official said adding that "there is a massive devastation in the city.” "Village after village has been wiped out" in Azad Kashmir, an army relief official said from Muzaffarabad said. "The Neelum River has been blocked because whole villages have fallen into the water," the official added. (Posted @ 20:35 PST)

Meanwhile, I'll keep making additions and small improvements to the earthquake's Community Walk site.

BY THE WAY, can anyone give me GPS coordinates for Lahore? The India/Pakistan/Kashmire border disputes are playing absolute hell with my usual tools for extracting GPS cooridinates!

I have set up a CommunityWalk site for the Islamabad Earthquake that I believe is editable by web visitors. I have put on it all the large quakes in the past 24 hours plus photos of the building collapse in Islamabad.

A is Islamabad; 8 is the epicenter of a 6.3 aftershock; 9 is the epicenter of the 7.6 quake.

Let me know if you are able to add information ([email protected] or make a comment).

WARNING: Community Walk crashes Safari.

I was up for a few minutes in the night checking my email, and I see that there has been a huge earthquake in Pakistan and India followed by some aftershocks.

DATE    LAT     LON     MAG     DEPTH   REGION
08-OCT-2005 05:26:05    34.71   73.11   5.6     10.0    PAKISTAN
08-OCT-2005 05:19:48    34.75   73.14   5.6     10.0    PAKISTAN
08-OCT-2005 05:08:42    34.71   73.35   5.4     10.0    PAKISTAN
08-OCT-2005 04:26:12    34.82   73.13   5.9     10.0    PAKISTAN
08-OCT-2005 03:50:38    34.43   73.54   7.6     10.0    PAKISTAN

There's some system called Wilbur through which data sets from specific seismic monitoring stations can be requested. A Google Earth overlay of the site of the quake is available, though I don't know what it entails.

I'm not sure what can be done with this data, but something can probably be done with it that is useful to someone, given that this is taking place in a place without much infrastructure and building codes.

Someone who writes a blog called ARMY ENGINEER'S BLOG who is in Islamabad reports:

All - just a quick post to let you know I am fine - this was an experience I surely don't wish to repeat!

We have had about 4 discernable aftershocks and a multi-story apartment building about a mile from our home has collapsed - as I write this helicopters are periodically passing overhead and ambulances are ferrying injured to hospitals; we've no idea how many injured or deceased.

A blogger in Kabul, Afghanistan reports feeling the quake.

UPDATE: Flickr user mbukhari_prm who lives in Islamabad has photos of the collapsed building that is the same one that's in the photo I saw in the NYT when I first saw the report of the earthquake.

About this photo, he writes:

Today 8 October 2005, at 8:50 a.m. Islamabad was hit by the most severe earthquake in the History of Pakistan - (on reachter scale it was 7.6). The earthquake played a havoc in Northern Areas, Azad Kashmir, NWFP and most of the Punjab.

The above photo shows the Magala Towers in F-10/4 Islmabad which collapsed and about 80 flats were demoslished as a result. Since it was the morning time, most of the the people were in their flats, and even at the time, this photo was taken, were under the debris. Police and Army teams were trying to rescue them.

The street address of the building is 10th Avenue, F-10 Markaz, Islamabad, Pakistan, as best I can determine.

Mid-Day in India reports:

Heavy casualties were feared in Islamabad as two blocks of an upmarket 19-storey 'Margala Towers' apartment building collapsed like a pack of cards turning into a heap of concrete and twisted steel.

The state-run PTV said that over 200 people were trapped under the debris. Many of them were alive and their desperate pleas for help could be heard. Army has been pressed to carry out the rescue operation and at least 10 survivors have been rescued so far.

Twentyfive people, including a judge, were killed when a court building collapsed in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), following the quake, TV networks quoting officials reported.

In North West Frontier Province (NWFP), nine persons were killed in Mansehra area after some houses collapsed following the quake, media reports here said, adding one child was killed and six injured in a wall collapse of a school building in Rawalpindi.

UPDATE (7:11 AM, CST) Here is the new MSNBC headline:

There are other mentions of buried or flattened villages in other news stories. I was curious why no place names were given. Here is an interesting passage that addresses that point:

Pakistani army officials who flew over quake-hit areas reported seeing hundreds of flattened homes in northern villages, a government official in Islamabad said. He declined to be named because he is not authorized to speak to the media.

So it is possible that such information in the possession of the government is supposed to come out through official channels. This will probably impede rescue opperations. And as the neurologists say, TIME IS BRAIN, which is to say that right at this moment there are lots of live people trapped in rubble, but one way or the other that will change.

There's been a really bad earthquake in Iran. CNN reported casualty estimates up to 20,000. I hope that the Bush administration offers significant assistance. After all, they have all this mobile, state of the art medical equipment and personnel in Iraq for the war. They have all this heavy machinery. If Bush acts fast and if Iran is willing to accept US assistance, thousands of people could be saved.