Fawzi Kabbara
Nader Soubra
After the April 1996 Israeli attack on South Lebanon, Khatib&Alami
(K&A) Consolidated Engineering Company was commissioned by the Higher
Relief Committee (HRC), and through a United Nations Development Program
(UNDP) to conduct a damage assessment survey and submit a report to the
Council of Ministers on the magnitude of the damage inflicted on the public
buildings, structures, and infrastructure as a result of this aggression.
K&A field crews from all various engineering departments were organised in teams and surveyed the damaged roads, public buildings, schools, electrical utilities, telephones, water resources, and sewers, in one hundred and fifty-nine (159) cities and villages in Southern Lebanon.
The GIS Services division at K&A used the field summary reports to produce a thematic map at a scale of 1:100,000 showing the type of damage at each bombarded location in the South by using ArcInfo GIS software. The following features were included in this map: political and administrative boundaries, cities and villages, the roads network, and the point features indicating the location and type of inflected damage to public properties and infrastructure.
This paper summarises the sequence of events and illustrates the use and possible applications of GIS in damage assessment.
The increased fighting between the local military groups in Southern Lebanon and the Israeli army lead to a wide escalation of the military events which resulted in heavy military strikes on a large number of towns and villages in Southern Lebanon in April of 1996. The military attacks affected residential areas forcing local residents to leave their homes and head to the safer areas. Heavy damage was inflicted upon physical structures including residential and public buildings, roads, bridges, and utility distribution networks. (See figures 1 and 2.)
The damage assessment revealed that: 159 towns and villages, 7201 residential units, 56 schools buildings, 59 religious sites, 40 water wells, 22 waters tanks, 72 electric lines, 102 telephone lines, 351 roads, 52 farms and 656 cars were totally or partially damaged.
The initial action of the Lebanese government was to provide humanitarian assistance; food, shelter, and medication to the relocated inhabitants of the South. After the cessation of the military activities, the government needed basic information about existing conditions in Southern Lebanon in order to provide assistance to the local residents and locate future emergency centres. The government also used this information about the damages to publicly owned buildings and local infrastructure in order to proceed with repairing the damage to the affected areas and to obtain initial estimates on the cost to complete the needed repairs. These estimates were presented to international financing agencies for support.
The HRC contracted K&A to conduct field surveys of the South to prepare a comprehensive damage assessment report. K&A managers developed and implemented a field survey plan to assess the damage in Southern Lebanon within one week. Ten (10) teams composed of nine (9) K&A engineers and surveyors from various engineering departments surveyed the damaged areas in only four (4) days. Field survey data were filled out in forms such as the one illustrated in (figure 3 or p1403.gif file.) The final summary report included a description of the type of damage (electrical, structural or infrastructure), as well as photographs of each damaged site. The damage reports were collected about electrical poles, distribution lines, public buildings, hospitals, bridges, roads, and retaining walls.
The reconstruction of the damaged areas began as soon as access to the Southern areas was safe. The initial reaction of the Lebanese Army was to remove any object which paused a threat to the local population such as unexploded bombs, uncovered or damaged electric lines, and distribution boxes, and to cut off heavily damaged roads.(See figure 4.) The rehabilitation also included backfilling large ditches in the middle of the hit roads in order to provide access to cut off areas.
The GIS Services Division staff worked with engineers from various departments at K&A on summarising the collected data, putting it all together in a single map and geographically documented all the collected summary reports. The map was also used to group the types of damages according to existing political and administrative divisions in Lebanon "Mohafaza", major administrative area, and "Kada" , sub-administrative areas, for future funds requests, allocation, and distribution.
The damage assessment map was developed using ArcInfo version 7.0.4 based on a SUN-SPARC10 workstation. We made use of data layers which were developed for other projects completed for the Electricity of Lebanon. The previously developed layers were at a scale of 1:100,000 from maps originally provided by the Lebanese Department of Geographic Affairs. These ArcInfo data layers included the following: (1) population centres including cities, towns and villages; (2) road layer showing highways, primary and secondary roads, (3) main and temporary rivers, lakes, and major and minor political boundaries; Mohafaza and Kada respectively. We can refer here to (figure 5 or p1405.gif file) for conceptual GIS data features and layers.
A clip was made of the Southern area of Lebanon focusing on the damaged areas. Then a point feature, named HITLOC, was added to show the location of the bombarded towns and sites. An attribute table of the HITLOC cover called TYPE was added to assign a different code number representing the type of damage to the public properties. The different types of damages included roads, buildings, electrical, structural or a combination of these type. The symbols which were used gave an indication of the location, type, and combination of damage at each location. The use of these symbology also gave explicit indication for the areas which had a combination of damage such as road, electrical and infrastructure. This symbology was used to identify the areas which were hit the hardest and needed immediate assistance. Other areas which had a single type of damage were given less priority for action depending on the identified impact.
The GIS application included data collection, and organisation according to political and administrative areas. Government and local official used the map to make plans for areas which have higher priority for allocation of funds and resources. Please check the GIS map (figure 6 or p1406.gif file) for more details.
As our experience showed, the availability of existing data layers from other projects allowed for a fast generation of a damage assessment map within few days. In similar situations field crews can proceed to damaged areas such as the ones affected by war, earthquakes, hurricanes or tornadoes to make summary reports and generate a representative thematic map.
Such maps can also be incorporated into Arcview where the geographic features can be combined with site photographs and scanned summary field reports to obtain initial assessment of the damage in a geographic, graphic, descriptive, and financial displays simultaneously if such data is well collected and documented.
The geographic representation perceived by the GIS approach generated a correlation between the different types of damages noted, the magnitude of the damages, and the affected population. This correlation helped the Lebanese Government in setting priorities for its fast track reconstruction process. It helped the Higher Relief Committee in locating new emergency centres. It helped the Lebanese Army in understanding the objectives of the attack. Finally, it gave the United Nations a quantitative figure about the losses in properties, roads, and utilities.
Hence, GIS proved to be a very effective tool in the collection, display, and representation of data for various applications and in this example, it was beneficial in providing, to the decision makers, the needed field information for a war damaged area in Southern Lebanon.
Many thanks to Mr. Jaques Ekmekji, the director of the GIS Services Division at Khatib and Alami for his contribution and support to this work. We also thank all K&A engineers and staff who have worked on the project and came up with excellent results.
