Cultural Heritage and Waste Heritage: Advanced techniques to preserve cultural heritage, exploring just in time the ruins produced by disasters and natural calamities

Abstract

Cultural Heritage and Waste Heritage are the focus of different research activities, but they are linked by tragic happenings: disasters and natural calamities. A synthetic formulation defines that disasters occur when hazards meet vulnerability; surely this concept is strong when there is a human involvement but for us this parameter is measurable not only by the label death toll, but also by damages to the legacy of physical artifacts and intangible attributes of a group or a society: that is Cultural Heritage. This paper introduces advanced techniques to preserve Cultural Heritage, exploring just in time ruins produced by disasters and natural calamities. The concept just in time is used to highlight the need to execute this activity during the first weeks/months after a negative event, to maximize the recovery phase before other alterations to the disaster site. Our research team is actually developing a small aerial drone to carry a payload devoted to explore L'Aquila city, which was strongly affected by the 2009 earthquake. This earthquake damaged about 10,000 buildings, leaving more than 65,000 people homeless. In this paper we propose new methodologies to explore ruins using advanced technologies (e.g. Multi-Rotors aerial drones, High Definition infrared cameras, 360° one-click panoramic cameras/optics, etc.) and an integrated waste management approach to deal with the critical after earthquake phase (e.g. demolition, transport and temporary storage, recycling and final disposal). © 2010 WIT Press.