MOORE, Okla. —"I don’t
think we’ve ever had a mission like this one,” said Lt. Col. Dave
Roberts of the door-to-door ground team the Civil Air Patrol is
performing for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The job, which began on Wednesday, is to photograph up to 12,000 home sites damaged by the Oklahoma tornadoes.
“We’ve
had boots on the ground and have been right in the middle of it from
day one,” said Roberts, Saturday’s CAP incident commander, of CAP’s role
in providing photographic assessments of every house damaged by the
tornadoes.
Half of the members conducting the mission are cadets
12 to 20 years old, he noted. To date, more than 100 members from the
Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas and Texas wings have contributed to the
aerial and ground team missions. “We’ve got some really sharp people
working and they are doing a great job," he said.
CAP’s aerial
photo tracks taken for FEMA and the Oklahoma Division of Emergency
Management, which documented the depth and width of the damage, were
added to Google Earth images from Moore and Oklahoma City to determine
where streets had been located and where houses were supposed to be,
creating a grid to guide CAP’s pilots.
On the ground, GPS
trackers are being used to locate housing sites within 30 feet of their
location, allowing CAP to photograph each home site. CAP is taking an
average of 500 photos per day, but is planning to triple that number
beginning Saturday with the addition of more volunteers and more
cameras.
“It really drives home what I’ve seen on the news the
last couple of days,” said Capt. Brian Summers of the Oklahoma Wing, a
ground team leader for the door-to-door photography. “I feel bad for the
people affected by the storms and am amazed at the positive attitude of
homeowners. All have said thank you for our support.
“CAP is
happy to be able to provide the pictures to allow everybody to see how
severe the damage was and to assist FEMA and others in planning for the
future and to support the people affected.”
“CAP gets the job
done; we don’t have to worry,” said Linda Pryor, emergency management
officer with ODEM, which is using the images “to compare which houses
were there and which weren’t so FEMA can get recovery money to the
homeowners.”
“I am honored to work with such am amazing team,”
said Chris Vaughn of FEMA. “Thank you for everything you do. You are
really making a difference in the way that we support survivors.”
Read more: http://www.koco.com
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