Case Study: Japanese Government achieves simplified and accelerated disaster recovery and damage assessment with TerraGo GeoPDF solutions

Japanese Government - Customer Case Study

After the March 11, 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear crisis, Japanese federal, prefectural and local governments needed a fast, safe way to assess building damage and issue disaster victim certificates—especially where on-the-ground inspections were impossible in the evacuation zone. The challenge was to rapidly produce, distribute and update maps that could combine property boundaries with pre- and post-disaster imagery to determine damage and enable compensation and reconstruction.

Hitachi Solutions, working with TerraGo, used GeoPDF geospatial collaboration tools to produce 38,501 GeoPDF maps combined into 42 map books covering more than 600 square miles, each with layers for pre-quake cadastral maps, SAR flood estimates and satellite imagery. The atlas was created in two days, donated to the Cabinet Office, and distributed to local governments, helping assessors confirm damage remotely—by the end of May 2011 about 150,000 of 180,000 applications were processed, and 183 properties in the Fukushima evacuation zone received certificates based solely on the GeoPDF imagery.

Japanese Government