Peace mending

摘要

Picture this: You are in charge of setting up a new geospatial reference system that will serve a large area and will be used to accurately survey road and bridge construction projects and renovations to water supply systems. The system must be usable for military and civilian projects. The job comes with some problems: a badly deteriorated infrastructure, the possibility of sniper fire and the reality of roadside bombs. Building a reference network in war-torn Iraq is the job of Wissam Al Hassani of the Iraqi Ministry of Water. Al Hassani worked for several years on a single project: surveying the country's damaged water system. That was extremely difficult since the country's survey infrastructure was a hodgepodge system based on a British system developed after the 1921 occupation; that system was woefully out-of-date and inaccurate. A 1970s Polish-designed system was of little use since there was little existing documentation. Al Hassani got his chance to literally change the way surveying operations were viewed in his country. The U.N. gifted an Iraqi ministry with four Topcon Total Stations (two GTS-225s and two GTS-710s); however, no one knew what to do with them. Lacking training and fearing the military might react poorly to unauthorized experimentation with the systems, the Total Stations sat in a warehouse in their unopened Topcon boxes.