A Mapathon to Pinpoint Areas Hardest Hit in Puerto Rico - The New York Times 10/14/20, 10(45

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A Mapathon to Pinpoint Areas Hardest Hit in Puerto Rico

By Alice Yin

Oct. 2, 2017

Satellite images of rural outposts and grooved mountainsides dominated the computer screens inside a room in
Manhattan, where more than 60 volunteers sat. One woman huddled over her laptop, carefully watching a thick
red square bloom from the pen tool as she traced over a building.

The group had assembled on Friday at Columbia University’s Butler Library, for a three-hour mapathon, a tech-
based response to the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, where Hurricane Maria ripped out entire buildings,
roads and power sources, resulting in logistical chaos on the ground.

Maps can show a hidden weakness during natural disasters. In remote areas, where forces often wreak the
greatest devastation, entire villages may have never made it onto a map. That could be because private
companies, which hold the rights to their maps, have less incentive to include those areas, or because the
government does not have the resources for frequent updates to existing maps. Even when a region is mapped,
changes in neighborhoods could alter the landscape drastically in less than a year.

Juan Francisco Saldarriaga, an adjunct professor at Columbia who was one of the organizers of the mapathon,
was shocked by the extent that Puerto Rico, despite being a U.S. territory, still lacked accurate data by the time
Hurricane Maria struck.

“A lot of buildings in the Caribbean islands haven’t been mapped,” said Mr. Saldarriaga, who specializes in
architecture and urban planning. “In New York, I tell my students that we’re spoiled by the amount of data we
have for our city.”

The likelihood of being “on the map” can be crudely gauged by something that Dale Kunce, senior geospatial
engineer at the American Red Cross, calls “the Starbucks test.” He said as long as someone can navigate to the
nearest Starbucks on their smartphone, their location is likely accounted for in databases such as Google Maps.

“A map is foundational to a person’s being, almost,” Mr. Kunce said in a telephone interview. “If you’re on the
map, if your building, street, neighborhood exists, you exist. And you have a voice.”

Alex Gil, Columbia’s digital scholarship coordinator, was another one of the organizers. Most of the volunteers
at the mapathon — hosted by Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities and Columbia
University Libraries — were greenhorns in cartography, working in conjunction with similar sessions at five
other universities across the nation.

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A Mapathon to Pinpoint Areas Hardest Hit in Puerto Rico - The New York Times 10/14/20, 10(45

“It was heartbreaking,” Mr. Gil said, of the destruction in Puerto Rico and of watching the lag in getting aid to
the island. “That’s when I hoped the global community can help out.”

Each volunteer was given a square of territory to update, which was then checked by
another participant before going live. Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times

To create the crowdsourced maps, the groups employed the OpenStreetMap platform, which has been called the
Wikipedia of mapping because of its open-source format, meaning anyone can modify or contribute to a project.
Organizers collaborated with the nonprofit Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, which uses the open-sourced
data tool to create maps for charitable causes. With its headquarters in Washington, the team usually works
with nonprofits and government bodies requesting services for disaster relief. In Puerto Rico, that’s the
American Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, both past clients.

Mr. Kunce, who also leads the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, is currently stationed in Puerto Rico. Every
night, before leaving his office, he downloads and prints out copies of crowdsourced maps for emergency
medical workers.

To create them, volunteers follow a simple process: Each mapmaker is allotted a different square of territory.
Mappers then look at satellite imagery and outline key geographic landmarks. For Columbia’s project, the focus
was buildings, but other mapathons have scribbled in roads, coastlines, bridges and more. Once another user
verifies the work, the completed map layer goes live, available to anyone with internet access.

Adeola Awe, a Bronx resident and a master’s student in geographic information science at Lehman College of
The City University of New York, arrived at the mapathon in Manhattan hoping to use his skills in urban
planning to help with relief efforts. After being disappointed by the scale of federal assistance, especially
compared to Houston and Miami’s post-hurricane responses, Mr. Awe decided to take a break from the
sophisticated mapping software that he has used to try a simpler, open-sourced model of OpenStreetMap.

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A Mapathon to Pinpoint Areas Hardest Hit in Puerto Rico - The New York Times 10/14/20, 10(45

Mr. Awe, an immigrant from Nigeria, knows firsthand how insufficient maps can slow down response efforts
after heavy flooding.

“We didn’t have these kinds of mapping efforts in my country, so investing my efforts in Puerto Rico today is
kind of like helping them, too,” Mr. Awe said.

Since the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team was founded in 2010, its volunteers have charted previously
unmapped villages in countries from Malawi to North Korea, placing an uncounted 45 million people on a map,
said Rebecca Firth, the community partnerships manager. As of Friday, 1,200 OpenStreetMap users have
contributed to mapping Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria, outlining 205,000 buildings and 7,200 kilometers of
road.

“Traditionally people viewed mapping as very expensive and professional,” Ms. Firth said. “We’ve proven a
bunch of volunteers with a small amount of training can create something that is nearly as good as something
you pay millions for.”

At the Columbia event, Latin music thrummed in the background, as friends conversed with each other in
Spanish, and a group of volunteers held a prolonged discussion with one of the facilitators about the deeper
intricacies of mapmaking.

Mr. Saldarriaga, a native of Colombia, credits part of the rising popularity of open-sourced mapping to the
intrinsic joy of building something. Mapping Puerto Rico was special to him, he said.

“We speak the same language, and so it’s sad to hear that people close to you are suffering that much,” he said.
“But when you’re just tracing buildings and mapping roads, achieving a great amount in a couple of hours, it’s a
little bit like therapy.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 24 of the New York edition with the headline: Aiding Puerto Rico by Mapping Out Areas Hit Hardest

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