LANL footage surveys damage to evacuee homes

From the Santa Fe New Mexican.com - As the Las Conchas Fire made its most threatening swipe at Los Alamos National Laboratory, administrators there deployed homegrown aerial surveillance technology known as Angel Fire to take both a wider and closer view of the situation. The project was intended to give thousands of evacuated residents reliable visual information on their homes and residences and to share with the public a detailed picture of the contours of the fire. "Users went wild," said Stephen Suddarth, one of the developers of Angel Fire and director of Transparent Sky, the company that donated the equipment and time for the flights. "There were 34,000 hits in the first hour." As of Tuesday, lab officials had recorded 1.1 million clicks on and within the website. LANL put the site together quickly with returning evacuees in mind. Included are panoramic swatches that can be magnified to a scale at which people and cars are visible, should there be any in the abandoned landscape. Read more