I’ve been trying to run through task “#1024 - Nepal Earthquake, 2015, Severely damaged housing areas and IDP Informal camps, Gorkha” using some of the post-quake imagery captured by DigitalGlobe on the Wednesday after the quake. I am looking at a tile of imagery from a very rural area.

Because it is monsoon season, Nepal was covered by quite a lot of cloud for a few days after the quake, and the imagery I am working on, from the 29th April 2015, isn’t very clear. There is cloud cover over the majority of the tile and this image has very high off-nadir angle, so the recently digitised building footprints do not line up with this imagery very precisely. However, it’s the best that is available, and it’s what I have to use.

To my interpretation, it seems that most of the buildings that are visible on my specific tile held up pretty well. The majority of rooflines seem to be present and there doesn’t appear to be rubble cascading away from the building sides.

Sadly, there is an exception. One particular building footprint stood alone, someway down a valley, and was clearly in the path of a landslide. Comparing the new imagery back to the pre-quake Bing image, it seems like this building has just gone. If anyone was inside when the landslide happened they wouldn’t have had much of a chance.

I am sure when better imagery arrives we will see many many more damaged or destroyed buildings - but that doesn’t make this one any better :(

New to OSM, these past few days have been my first steps onboard. I’ve been meaning to contribute to HOT for a while, and the Nepal event finally spurred me into action. I put in about 3k building footprints on the day after the earthquake - back then they were some of the first building footprints in the rural areas. Pretty proud of that. Now, 6 days later, it is hard to find unmapped buildings! The swift progress on this data capture is amazing to see.

I’ve certainly learnt a few lessons along the way about doing things the OSM way, thanks to some of the HOTOSM user community. Very welcoming.

In 4 days time I am hoping to put as many volunteers from our office as possible to the task; I’m expecting somewhere between 8 - 15 people to be involved. Hopefully we can make a pretty big dent over the course of a day - and with luck some of the folk will carry on in their spare time. We will see how it goes.