From the American Statesman
His work at home position is “pro bono”, but in my book, he’s still a work at home hero.
In the days after Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana, Jason Bollenbacher contributed to the rescue effort without leaving the safety of his home office.
But it was plenty important to search teams in the field.
Bollenbacher, 32, a technical help-desk worker for Time Warner Cable, spent most of his off-work hours in the days after Katrina struck Louisiana and Mississippi on Aug. 29 using his home computers to make highly accurate map images from aerial photographs taken of the Louisiana flood damage.
He did it by overlaying the photographs on the satellite Earth imaging program called Google Earth, a recent creation of Google Inc., the giant online search engine company.
Bollenbacher wasn’t trying to be heroic. He is just an avid Google Earth user who thought it would be cool to overlay flood photographs on satellite maps to get a better picture of the flood damage.
“We started receiving requests from NOAA” to process images in certain parts of Louisiana to help rescue coordinators plan their missions to help stranded storm victims in New Orleans and nearby parishes, he said.
“I later found out they were using them for rooftop resources as well as routes for military and Red Cross (vehicles and boats).”
After a few days, the government called on computer researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to use their sophisticated imaging software to coordinate with Google to turn out automated flood-damage maps. But Bollenbacher stayed online and handled requests from hundreds of storm evacuees to get images of the storm damage to their homes, businesses and college campuses.
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