sOFTWARE + TECHNOLOGY
A team of planners, engineers, geologists, and architects have been teaching the local residents in Medellin City, Columbia, how to monitor water ingress, engineer emergency draining solutions, and identify early warning signs of a landslide, which could devastate their community.
Monitoring movement Two Scottish universities use WhatsApp to predict deadly landslides in Columbia.
warning signs of a landslide, an event which could devastate their com- munity and similar neighborhoods along the hillside. The Heriot-Watt team is led by Dr. Harry Smith, director of the Centre for Environment & Human Settlements. “Colombia is a country with a serious landslide problem,” he said. “Casualty numbers are high and growing. There are approximately 44,000 households living in informal settlements in the Medellin MetropolitanArea which are at risk, many of which have no proper foundations. “Working with our Colombian colleagues, we identified an area that was at huge risk and have formed an ongoing partnership with the local community. We installed a monitoring system and trained a community group to collect data and photographs, which they sent us regularly on WhatsApp.” Dr Gabriela Medero, an associate professor in Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering at Heriot-Watt University, said, “We
Two Scottish universities are using WhatsApp to help predict deadly landslides in Colombia by training a local community to monitor how their hillside is shifting over time. The team, which includes colleagues from Heriot-Watt University, the University of Edinburgh, and the Na- tional University of Colombia, is working with the community of an informal settlement in Medellin City, which is perched at the top of a high slope. The multi-skilled team, which includes planners, engineers, geologists, and architects, have been teaching the local residents how to monitor water ingress, engineer emergency draining solutions, and identify early
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march 2018
csengineermag.com
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