Oilspill

If you sit in front a long list of information, it is often difficult to make quickly sense of it. If you look at a map of the same data, you might get a picture of it rather quickly.

1,470,000 US gallons of oil were leaking from an oil pipe of British Petrol in the Gulf of Mexico everyday. What does that tell you? When you look at this map from ifitweremyhome.com, then you get a better sense of it. The oil spill size was as big as Southern UK.If you do have some data, you can start working with a new great tool called openheatmap.com, however if not, then you need to collect it yourself.  One way is done by the grassrootmapping.orgproject, which has done a great initiative to document the oil spill on the coast line. Another one is theOil Reporter from the Crisis Commons group. You “only” need an Iphone or Android driven phone and you can get the app to report where oil is found.