Assessment of Placing of Field Hospitals After the 2010 Haiti EarthquakeUsing Geospatial Data

Sammanfattning: When natural disasters such as earthquakes happen, there is a need for an efficient method to support humanitarian aid organizations in the decision making process. One such decision is placement of Foreign Field Hospitals to assist with medical help.To support such a decision lots of different information and data needs to be gathered and combined. The main objectives of this thesis are to collect existing data published shortly after the earthquake in Haiti 2010 as well as data published up to two months after the earthquake. The data is then to be evaluated according to adequacy for analysis and the result of the analysis to be compared to the actual placements of the field hospitals after the 2010 earthquake.The method used in this analysis is Multi Criteria Evaluation (MCE). Data regarding population, elevation, roads, land use, damage, climate, water, health facility locations and airport location are collected and weighted relative with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with weights retrieved from a questionnaire sent out to Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and countries involved in the disaster relief. The result obtained from the MCE is a final suitability map depicting areas that are suitable according to the different factors.The data availability for the thesis project is an issue, due to lack of data published shortly after the earthquake. Some of the data used in the analysis do not have the sufficient detail level. Still, an analysis can be performed where suitable areas are obtained.The suitable locations found in the analysis agree well in most cases with where the actual FFHs are placed, however a few locations are not in proximity to where the suitable areas lie. A few of the locations were located in areas exposed to frequently floods. Even though the data availability and quality leaves things to desire, the analysis method shows promising results for future research. The approach could help aggregating information from different sources and provide support in pre-dispatch organization, already having a set of suitable locations to arrive to.