Disaster map aids Taal relief teams

MANILA, Philippine — “When Taal began to erupt,” recalled May Layugan, as her hand drew a line across Taal Lake on the enlarged map projected on the screen, “everyone south of Tagaytay began to move up to Manila.”

Behind her, a staffer clicked something on the computer, which showed several orange arrows arcing away from Southern Luzon to the National Capital Region.

Another click and the arrows disappeared, replaced by varying sizes of pink circles across the map.

“That same time, nobody was on the island,” she said, pointing to the image of a dotless Volcano Island.

In the three weeks after Taal Volcano spewed ash and smoke that Sunday of Jan. 12, Layugan, operations head of the Philippine Red Cross (PRC), interpreted these shapes to decide how best to deploy the organization’s limited resources. Arrows meant movement, and dots meant clusters of people.

These shapes represent anonymized, near real-time data from Facebook’s users who turned on their location service on the app, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

These are then de-identified and aggregated onto what is called Disaster Maps, a Facebook program allowing humanitarian organizations like the PRC to fill in the gaps of volunteer reports on the ground with data to better direct emergency response.

Arrows, dots

Culling data from social media remains a sensitive issue, given the range of concerns from privacy to election interference confronting data giants like Google and Facebook.

But the program is seen as a showcase on how even aggregated, depersonalized data can be harnessed and used to save lives.

First launched globally in 2017 and later used by the PRC for the first time during Typhoon “Ompong” (international name: Mangkhut) in 2018, the Disaster Maps program helps emergency response agencies identify where displaced people are and where to distribute needed supplies.

The program uses GPS information from Facebook users who choose to share their locations.

“After all, we are the FB nation,” Layugan joked. She pointed out that even the absence of shapes and dots in an area can still be useful data.

Interpreting shapes

“We have this rule in Red Cross where we need to prioritize a minimum of 30 percent of the most vulnerable,” she said. “We can’t help everyone, so we need to make sure we are targeting the correct chunk of the affected population.”

When Taal erupted that Sunday, Facebook activated the maps within 24 hours and GPS data is refreshed every four to eight hours.

Layugan and a skeletal team of 20 monitored these from the PRC’s operations center in Mandaluyong City. Mostly, they looked at movement, allowing them to identify which areas were having an influx of evacuees.

Huge numbers of people were moving from Batangas province to Manila, and this was enough to sound the alarm on the PRC’s Manila chapters.

But knowing Batangas’ middle-class profile, Layugan said, “we interpreted the data to mean they were moving in with their relatives in Manila. They were not necessarily moving out and creating a large number of evacuees there.”

True enough, the maps showed the same volume of people returning to Batangas proper the next day. From there, people kept moving back and forth in small increments: in and out of the towns of Bauan, Talisay and Tanauan City, among others.

“At the time, some of the evacuees were returning to areas whenever there are relief operations or if they just want to check in on their houses,” she explained.

During the lockdowns that followed the eruption, the highest clusters of people were in Bauan and Batangas City. Validation on the ground showed that several volunteers were already stationed there, freeing the PRC to select other towns in Batangas that needed food and clothes.

For now, the maps bridge the information gaps between disaster volunteers.

Livelihood recovery

The provincial government of Batangas said it would help locals regain their livelihoods, after Taal’s eruption.

Gov. Hermilando Mandanas, speaking on Friday at the Batangas Economic Recovery Roundtable at the Lima Park Hotel here, said he saw the eruption as an opportunity for the province to “level up” in tourism development.

He said there were plans to revive the once popular Matabungkay Beach in Lian town, far west of the volcano.

“It was not Boracay that was the No. 1 beach resort in the country before. It was Matabungkay. But it was forgotten,” Mandanas said.

The governor said the province would also highlight Verde Island Passage in its southwest, which a nonprofit group described as a “center of global shore-fish biodiversity.”

Locals will be provided work that is similar to what they were doing, Mandanas said.

“So we will move them,” he said, referring to fish farmers in Lemery, one of the towns affected by the eruption. “Instead of feeding tilapia, they will be feeding ‘lapu-lapu,’ which is a higher price.”

Vice Gov. Mark Leviste said “this is a good opportunity for us to highlight and focus on other areas not limited to our beaches and other popular summer destinations.”

Stakeholders emphasize how Taal’s eruption took a toll on tourism in the province.

“The physical damage is minimal, but the invisible da¬mage is greater because of the perception,” said Saturnino Belen Jr., chair of First Asia Venture Capital Inc.

—With a report from Kimmy Baraoidan