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>>ANCHOR: Getting back to Irene, a team from RIT has been out documenting the damage from
that storm. They're taking aerial photos of flooded areas using technology they say may
change the way people respond to natural disasters. 13WHAM's Adam Chodak joins us now. Adam, I
know this project is getting some national attention from some of the emergency responders.
>>REPORTER: Yeah, it absolutely is, Don. Their technology has been employed in three major
disasters now. Over in the Schenectady area, emergency crews have their pictures right
in the center of the room over there. Today we talked to the team behind the technology.
>>DON McKEOWN: This is not a lightweight pocket digital camera.
>>JASON FAULRING: No.
>>REPORTER: No, this is one of those cameras that cost more than most homes.
>>DON McKEOWN: This is what's called the WASP sensor. It was originally developed for the
Forest Service under a NASA grant to detect and map wildfires.
>>REPORTER: Its architects are RIT engineers Don McKeown and Jason Faulring. They threw
together four different cameras to take state-of-the-art aerial pictures of natural disasters.
>>DON McKEOWN: We want to be able to provide the decision makers, the disaster managers,
information products that they can facilitate for better decision making.
>>JASON FAULRING: You can kind of see there's all kinds of debris all over the place.
>>REPORTER: Right after Hurricane Irene, Faulring flew the big sensor over a creek just west
of Schenectady.
>>JASON FAULRING: Doing a real simple threshold algorithm, it actually pokes out over where
a lot of the major water systems are.
>>REPORTER: In non-technical talk, it means they can pinpoint flooded areas quickly. All
cool, but where this system eclipses others is in its ability to process images quickly.
>>JASON FAULRING: We can actually process on the fly in certain situations so we can
actually have the imagery available when we land the airplane.
>>REPORTER: That's exactly what they did in Haiti after the earthquake. They also developed
maps for the Japanese government post-tsunami.
>>DON McKEOWN: The issue there was to very quickly turnaround maps that could be taken
out into the field by disaster managers in Japan.
>>REPORTER: As you might imagine, people have come knocking, including New York's Office
of Emergency Management.
>>DON McKEOWN: They're ecstatic with what we've been giving them recently.
>>REPORTER: The ultimate goal is to move the technology out into the business world where
it can really take off, but until then RIT plans to fine-tune it, keep it in-house and
use it as a teaching tool. Reporting live, Adam Chodak, 13WHAM News.