During March 25th 2015, unusual floods destroyed several cities in the Atacama Desert (see video above), now considered as one of the most impressive disasters in the history of this region (also called the "25M" in Chile).

 

After the phenomenon, associated with El Niño and climate change, as many experts claim, work started on traditional risk analysis models. Despite this usual academic effervescence after disasters, we started to figure out that new tools are needed to understand landscape and infrastructural responses, but also for citizen's education about risk.

 

Videos in Youtube were abundant, providing a lot of information for places that were difficult to cover due to highways destruction. We started an intuitive work of video georeferentiation in Google Maps of this material and more than 100 videos were uploaded in all the Atacama Region in www.centrodeproyectosatacama.cl 

 

Now in a collaborative mode, the VIDEO MAP is becoming a useful tool for the physical understanding of the phenomenon and the "human interface of risk analysis". Multidisciplinary teams and even children in the local schools are taking advantage of this free platform that is looking for new communicative tools for territory planning.