NASA applications and applied research on industrial incidents help emergency preparedness leaders develop mitigation approaches — such as early warning systems — and provide information and maps to response and recovery teams.
In 2016, a nighttime fire at a power plant substation in Puerto Rico knocked out power to nearly 1.5 million customers. From space, the effects appeared dramatic. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NASA/NOAA Suomi NPP satellite captured images that helped response personnel before and after the outage.
