A coverage-gap check: some hard-hit coastal places have no remote-sensing damage assessment yet
Hi all, and thank you to everyone mapping this response.
I’m an independent volunteer, and (full disclosure up front) I put this together using
public data and automated/scripted tooling. I’m not an experienced OSM mapper myself.
I tried to answer one narrow question: which populated places have no remote-sensing
building-damage assessment yet? The tooling took the damage products that already exist,
unioned their footprints, and tested OpenStreetMap populated places against them. Places that
fall outside all of them are blind-spots for a satellite/aerial damage layer, though
(importantly) that is not the same as “no aid has reached them” (see caveats).
One caveat about my own method, since this is the #54357 thread: I used your task area as
one of the “covered” layers, which is a rough proxy on my part. It tells me mapping is
already underway there (thank you for that), not that a finished damage assessment exists, so
I’m treating #54357 as the softest of my inputs.
Two areas stood out that don’t appear to be covered yet:
1. The eastern La Guaira coast and the Galipán hillside. #54357 covers Maiquetía/La Guaira
and Microsoft AI4G covers Catia La Mar, but the coastal road east of Caraballeda (Naiguatá,
Camurí Grande, Anare, Todasana, Caruao, Chuspa) and the Galipán mountain villages fall
outside every remote-sensing product I could find. That is 42 of the 109 coastal places I
tested. (The products tested were Microsoft AI4G, #54357, and Copernicus EMSR884; UNOSAT’s
only Venezuela analysis is near Caracas and doesn’t reach this coast, so it neither covers nor
rules out anything here.)
2. The Carabobo-Falcón coast, near the M7.5 epicentre. Copernicus assessed Morón (a real
grading product) and delineated Puerto Cabello, but Tucacas (press reports a 5-storey
collapse, La Mar Suites), Urama (press reports homes destroyed across Morón and Urama
parishes), Chichiriviche and Boca de Aroa sit outside every EMSR884 grading AOI.
This region has only EMSR884 as a layer, so I’m less certain here, but the epicentre proximity
and the reported collapses make it worth a look.
Method (reproducible): OSM Overpass for the places; footprints from Microsoft AI4G (HDX),
the #54357 task AOI (TM API), and Copernicus EMSR884 grading AOIs (ArcGIS feature services);
ray-cast point-in-polygon on place centroids. The 46 gap points are in the attached CSV,
and the full code plus data plus instructions are here:
Venezuela 2026 earthquake — building-damage assessment-coverage gap analysis (public data + code, no PII). Run: python3 recompute.py -> covered 67 / GAPS 42. See REPRODUCE.md. · GitHub . Clone and run
python3 recompute.py and it should print covered 67 / GAPS 42.
Honest caveats: “no remote-sensing assessment” is not “no aid”; Tucacas, for instance,
had international rescue teams. The Carabobo-Falcón result is single-source. I used place
centroids (a proxy), and OSM place completeness varies. I excluded EMSR884’s full-extent
reference envelope (AOI00) so it wouldn’t falsely mark everything covered. The Zone-2 damage
details are from press reports, not an official assessment. No personal data is involved.
Indicative AOIs (pad before drawing a real task; these just bound the gap points):
- Eastern La Guaira coast:
-66.793, 10.575, -66.292, 10.644
- Galipán / western tip:
-67.144, 10.538, -66.876, 10.598
- Tucacas / Carabobo-Falcón coast:
-68.332, 10.444, -68.271, 10.945
Since I’m not a mapper myself, I’m offering this as data and analysis you can use, not as
hands-on mapping. The 46 priority points (CSV) are attached, and the full code plus data are
in the gist linked above. I’m happy to refine the data, adjust the AOIs, or answer questions
about how it was produced. Is this useful, and if so what would help most?
Thanks again.
Attach: assessment_gaps_priority.csv (the 46 points).
Full code + data (gist): Venezuela 2026 earthquake — building-damage assessment-coverage gap analysis (public data + code, no PII). Run: python3 recompute.py -> covered 67 / GAPS 42. See REPRODUCE.md. · GitHub