Fla. Wing photographs Panhandle coastline for state agency wary of oil spill

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This photo, taken along Perdido Beach Boulevard in Pensacola, is one of nearly 2,800 taken by a Florida Wing aircrew May 6 in response to a Florida Department of Environmental Protection request.


Maj. Douglas E. Jessmer
Public Affairs Officer
Florida Wing

FLORIDA -- After bracing for immediate response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Florida Wing is standing down – but only after providing some 2,800 photos, geo-coded and prepared for the state Department of Environmental Protection, taken at three-second intervals above the roughly 150 miles from the Alabama border east to Franklin County.

The DEP, calling on Civil Air Patrol for the first time ever, had requested a baseline image of areas along the Florida Panhandle that might be affected by the spill. CAP is the only state support agency supplying geo-tagged aerial imaging.

"Now that this initial tasking is completed, CAP will be in a wait-but-ready mode,” said 1st Lt. Bill Weiler, Florida Wing Group 4 deputy commander and the wing’s officer in charge of emergency information. "Along with everyone in Florida, we’ll be watching the movement of the oil, hoping it doesn’t come to our shores, but we’ll be ready to assist the state as needed.”

On May 6, a three-member aircrew launched from Pensacola and flew a large swath of the Panhandle’s coastline to fulfill the photo request. The resulting photos totaled almost 10 gigabytes of data.

"CAP’s extensive experience with aerial imaging for the state used during disaster relief recon, along with being an economical asset, made CAP the logical organization to undertake this tasking,” Weiler said. "This initial mission also served as a demonstration to DEP as to the capabilities and rapid response available from CAP.”

The crew used a camera connected to an airborne laptop computer and a GPS to code the images’ location. After the flight, additional processing stitches the photos together into a panorama.

"The pictures look great,” state geographic information systems administrator Richard Butgereit said. The photos were "a good product, with good turnaround,” he said.

Butgereit, who’s also the chairman of the state Department of Emergency Management’s geographic information systems committee, said receiving all the photos in a single dump left the state’s system temporarily overwhelmed.

One of Butgereit’s goals is to tie all the state’s imaging into a long-term strategic asset available to the public. He views the CAP images as "documenting the evidence” of the state’s coastline condition before any oil-spill damage occurs.

The photos will also be used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, where department officials were also impressed with the images, Weiler said.

With the Florida Wing’s standby stance, CAP’s incident commander — provided by the Alabama Wing, with authority from Southeast Region — for the oil spill will be based at the unified command center in Mobile, Ala.

According to Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission, most of the oil is west of the site of the Deepwater Horizon rig, and continues moving west.