UXB Trentino – Mapping a Province
Since the year 2000, CAR has been working for the government of the Province of Trento (Provincia Autonoma di Trento) in Northern Italy in order to map the risk of unexploded air-dropped weapons from World War II. Initially a project to map the populous Adige Valley, the strong preliminary results of UXB Trentino led to an extension of the study to cover the entire provincial territory – an area of 6,200 square kilometres and half a million inhabitants.
The Problem
The Region of Trentino-Alto Adige, comprising the Provinces of Trento and Bolzano, was heavily attacked by the USAAF and RAF for a period of seven months at the end of the War in order to disrupt the main rail line between Germany and Italy. The attacks led to the dropping of over 38,000 high explosive bombs on Trento Province alone, combined with numerous other fragmentation, cluster and incendiary weapons.
These attacks have left a legacy of unexploded ordnance (mostly 500 and 1,000lb bombs) which have become an increasing threat as they are disturbed through the redevelopment and expansion of transport infrastructure and urban areas. Prior to the study, unplanned findings of UXO resulted in costly and highly disruptive interruption to development projects and large scale evacuations of local residents.
Web-based Solution
The Civil Defence department of the provincial government required an approach to risk assessment that would facilitate development control and allow proactive rather than reactive clearance operations by military specialists. CAR and ITC-Irst Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) formed a project team to undertake a risk mapping study, comprising data collection, analysis and presentation in a web-based Geographical Information System (GIS).
CAR's work involved gathering, analysing and geocoding thousands of pages of original wartime attack and ordnance records combined with reconnaissance photos that were taken to assess the effects of the bombing campaign. The work was assisted by proprietary finding aids that cover continental Europe, giving access to archives with over 15 million original air photos.
FBK designed a risk mapping interface that integrated CAR’s geocoded attack data with the air photos, and employed both manual imagery interpretation and automatic pattern recognition based on statistical machine learning. The end result was a state-of-the-art WEB GIS that allows Civil Defence employees to interrogate a risk map of bombed areas, browse reconnaissance photos and auto-generate written reports. All these functions can be performed through a web browser, without the need for specialist software or GIS knowledge.
