More than 135,000 Photos Captured From The Air

The numbers keep climbing: Civil Air Patrol aircrews though Monday have flown 291.9 hours and generated 135,548 photographs of floods and damage in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, with 279 members from 33 wings participating in the overall mission.

Thirty-eight CAP planes and two full-motion-video planes are involved, said Lt. Col. Stephen Robertson, the Texas Wing’s representative at the Texas Emergency Operations Center. In all, 197 CAP members are deployed at the wing’s incident command post at San Marcos Regional Airport and at Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base.

To complement the Texas Wing, aircraft, aircrews and mission staff have come in from Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wisconsin, along with National Headquarters, Robertson said.

The hurricane-battered area being photographed covers “roughly 255 miles of coastline from the Corpus Christi landfall impact zone to Beaumont and Port Arthur,” he said.“Our collection area goes roughly 90 miles inland, covering approximately 23,000 square miles, including the city of Houston and eight major rivers,” he said.CAP is coordinating with a multitude of search and rescue organizations and other imagery providers through the Texas Air Operation Center in Austin to make sure flight paths don’t conflict.

So far, Robertson said, “there are no requests from the state for ground team support in any capacity.”

Just two weeks ago, he added, the Southwest Region conducted a multi-wing and –region exercise, and “many lessons learned there have been applied to this response.”

(Image provided with CAP news release)

FMI: www.gocivilairpatrol.com