NASA technology helped rescue four men from damaged buildings in Nepal, according to media reports.
Authorities used a radar detector known as Finder, which is short for Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response. They used it to find two survivors that were trapped in a collapsed textile factory, as well as two others who were found in a different building in the Nepalese town of Chautara.
The nation is still digging out after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake rocked the region on April 25, resulting in thousands of casualties and untold property damage.
James Lux, who is the task manager for Finder at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that he was “gratified” that Finder did its job, as it’s the first time it has been used in a disaster situation.
The device is no bigger than a suitcase, and is less than 20 pounds in weight. It can be used to spot victims that are stuck under 10 feet of rubble, and was developed in collaboration between JPL and the Department of Homeland Security. The technology was brought to Nepal four days after the earthquake to assist in search and rescue of survivors.
Searching for victims in collapsed buildings is extremely challenging, as victims can often be stuck under many feet of debris and can be unconscious or simply unable to yell for help.
Finder gets around problems of finding these victims by using radar to detect tiny motions that are characteristic of human movements. It sends out a small microwave signal that penetrates the rubble and bounces off potential victims. The device then analyzes those signals and determines if someone is there.
And the human doesn’t have to move a lot. Finder can detect very subtle movements in the human body — small, pulsing motions such as the heartbeat or the rise and fall of a person’s chest.
These movements causes a shift in the timing of the microwaves, which are returned slightly sooner than expected and therefore indicate the presence of a human.
Finder has software that is specialized for analyzing patterns and distinguishing human patterns from those of animals or other rhyhtmic motions, like a tree branch moving. It introduces a whole new tool for rescuers in a challenging environment like a disaster of this proportion.
Meanwhile, Nepal is still struggling to deal with the magnitude of the tragedy. It has killed more than 8,000 people and injured double that.
The epicenter was located in the village of Barpak in the Gorkha district at a depth of about 9.3 miles, and it was the most powerful earthquake to hit Nepal since the 1934 Nepal-Bihar earthquake. There were also casualties in neighboring India, China, and Bangladesh.
The earthquake also caused an avalanche on Mount Everest that struck the base camp used by climbers, killing 19, the deadliest day in the history of the tallest mountain in the world. It also caused an avalanche in Langtang valley, and 250 are reported missing from that incident.
In addition to the casualties, hundreds of thousands of people remain homeless after their villages were destroyed. The earthquake also destroyed UNESCO World Heritage sites.
Still, it’s not a tremendous surprise to geophysicists, who have long warned that Nepal is vulnerable to a deadly earthquake due to its geology and the architecture.
Aftershocks continued to strike the area at 15-20 minute intervals, and one of them was a magnitude 6.7 the day after the big quake.
Nepal sits at the southern end of a diffuse collisional boundary where the Indian Plate slams into the Eurasian plate.
The earthquake killed 7,500 people in Nepal and injured many more as of May 8, with Nepal’s Prime Minister Sushil Koirala saying that the number could top 10,000. More than 450,000 people were displaced by the strategy.
About 78 deaths were reported in India, with 58 in Bihar, 16 in Uttar Pradesh, one in Rajasthan, and three in West Bengal. About 25 dead and four are missing in China, all of them in Tibet. Four were reported dead in Bangladesh. No casualties were reported in Bhutan.
The avalanche on Mount Everest killed Google executive Dan Fredinburg. He suffered head injuries in the avalanche at Mount Everest’s South Base Camp.
