Transcript:
In January, wildfires destroyed Brianna Pagán’s California home. It was a chaotic and terrifying time.
Before evacuating, Pagán was using an app to monitor the fire’s spread. But there were long delays between updates because it was too windy to fly the planes that monitor fires.
So she had to rely on friends and neighbors to make decisions and plan the safest evacuation route.
Pagán: “Calling neighbors to see where they were going or … where the fire was relative to where they were.”
And after evacuating, she had to wait and worry, not knowing that her home had burned down.
But she says getting more current information during a crisis should be possible. She’s an expert in satellite technology and worked in a satellite data center.
She says private companies and the military already have satellites in orbit gathering high-resolution images of the Earth.
So she urges her industry to use its technology to capture useful data during fires and other disasters and create ways to make it accessible to the public.
Pagán: “That’s where I think there’s a lot of people power needed is to think about how to actually, if the data is available, get it to … the people who are undergoing the natural disaster.”
Reporting credit: Sarah Kennedy / ChavoBart Digital Media
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