CLEARWATER, Fla., May 10, 2010:
After bracing for immediate response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Civil Air Patrol personnel from Florida Wing are standing down – for now.
The state’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), in its first-ever CAP tasking, requested a baseline image of areas along the Florida panhandle that might be affected by the spill. CAP is the only state support agency supplying geo-tagged aerial imaging.
"Now that this initial tasking is completed, CAP will be in a wait-but-ready mode,” according to 1st Lt. Bill Weiler, the wing’s officer in charge of emergency information. "Along with everyone in Florida, we’ll be watching the movement of the oil, hoping it doesn’t come to our shores, but we’ll be ready to assist the state as needed.”
On May 6, a three-member aircrew launched from Pensacola and flew a large swath of the panhandle’s coastline. Nearly 2,800 photos – almost 10 gigabytes of data – were taken, geo-coded and prepared for the DEP. The images were taken at 3-second intervals, to provide overlap, from the Alabama border east to Franklin County.
"CAP’s extensive experience with aerial imaging for the state used during disaster relief recon, along with being an economical asset, made CAP the logical organization to undertake this tasking,” Weiler said. "This initial mission also served as a demonstration to DEP as to the capabilities and rapid response available from CAP.”
The crew used a camera connected to an airborne laptop computer and a GPS to code the images’ location. After the flight, additional processing stitches the photos together into a panorama.
"The pictures look great,” State Geographic Information Systems Administrator Richard Butgereit said, adding the photos were "a good product, with good turnaround.”
Butgereit, who’s also the chairman of the state Department of Emergency Management’s geographic information systems committee, said the state system was temporarily overwhelmed with the more than 2,700 photos – almost 10 gigabytes of data – in a single dump.
One of Butgereit’s goals is to tie all the state’s imaging into a long-term strategic asset available to the public. He views the CAP images as "documenting the evidence” of the state’s coastline condition before any oil-spill damage encroaches.
The photos will also be used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, after department officials were impressed with the images, Weiler said.
With Florida Wing’s standby stance, CAP’s incident commander for the oil spill will be based at the unified command center in Mobile, Ala. Alabama Wing is providing the IC, with authority from Southeast Region.
According to the state’s Fish and Wildlife Commission, most of the oil is west of the site of the Deepwater Horizon rig, and continues moving west.
On the Web
Coastal imagery:
www.flwg-es.us/recon/viewer.htm
Florida Wing's oil spill response site:
flwg.us/deepwater.aspx
Civil Air Patrol, the uniformed, all-volunteer civilian auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force, is a nonprofit organization with more than 56,000 members nationwide. CAP performs 90 percent of continental U.S. inland search and rescue missions as tasked by the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center and was credited by the AFRCC with saving 90 lives in fiscal year 2008. Its volunteers also perform homeland security, disaster relief and counter-drug missions at the request of federal, state and local agencies. The members play a leading role in aerospace education and serve as mentors to the nearly 22,000 young people currently participating in CAP cadet programs. CAP has been performing missions for America since 1941.
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