Motherboard

A terrifying week in Haiti has inspired innovative new ways to help hundreds of thousands of people in need of help after a devastating magnitude-7 earthquake leveled much of Port-au-Prince Tuesday.

Satellites have finally got something better to do than help me try to get a Google Street View of a capybara and are being used to help rescuers locate where need for aid is greatest in the devastated capital.

The quake heavily disrupted Haiti’s standard communication link so satellite operations world-wide are helping in the effort- GeoEye, DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1 and QuickBird. France’s Spot-5, Japan’s ALOS, The European Space Agency’s ERS-2 and Envisat, and Canada’s RadarSat-2 -are helping lead rescuers to the worst-hit places as well as determine the best places to set up headquarters.

Once on the ground, establishing telecommunications is key and the French nonprofit Telecoms Sans Frontiers (Telecommunications Without Borders) is on it by sending two teams of to Haiti to help facilitate communications to people trying to get in touch with family and relatives.

The group’s U.S. representative, Paul Margie, said a three-person team based in Nicaragua was en route to Santo Domingo, the capital of Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic. Another six-person team from France was also on the way.

Margie said it is a fairly large deployment for the group, which also sent out multiple teams after a series of typhoons hit the Philippines last year.

Although things in Haiti are still, today, unimaginably chaotic and shit-yourself scary, it’s nice to be able to applaud the efforts of people taking action to help others.