The phone can ring at any moment, day or night. In the Emergency Room of e-GEOS, there is always someone ready to answer—because disasters don’t follow a schedule and often strike without warning.
From Via Tiburtina, just a few kilometers from the center of Rome, vital support is dispatched to those on the front lines during emergencies: here, satellite images are turned into maps, data, and concrete tools to help populations and rescue teams in crisis.
The Emergency Room consists of two interconnected areas: one for operational coordination, and another filled with rows of computers. Each monitor is a window onto the world, showing areas struck by earthquakes, floods, fires, or landslides.
Requests for support arrive from Brussels, the headquarters of European coordination, which assigns them to one of the two Copernicus Emergency Management Service centers. From that moment, it becomes a race against time.
The Time Factor
“Speed is everything,” explains Lucia Luzietti, e-GEOS manager for Copernicus data analysis.
Once an alert is triggered, the team has no more than two hours to complete the first analysis, define the areas of interest with the user, and acquire the necessary satellite images. Missing a single useful step can make the difference between having up-to-date maps and leaving rescue teams without crucial tools.
Behind Luzietti, operators observe and interpret satellite data: from the earthquake that devastated Myanmar to more local events, such as the 2023 flood that brought Romagna to its knees. In these cases, the radar satellites of the European Sentinel constellation, capable of “seeing” through clouds, make it possible to provide rapid and reliable information.
Before and After Disaster Strikes
The work of the Emergency Room doesn’t stop at the moment of impact. Thanks to Rapid Mapping and Recovery Mapping, maps are produced both immediately—to guide emergency response—and in the weeks and months that follow, to assess the extent of the damage and plan reconstruction.
Since 2012, the e-GEOS center has supported nearly a thousand emergencies in dozens of countries.
The maps reach wherever they are needed: to rescue teams in remote areas, to United Nations operators, or—even as in the case of the 2015 Nepal earthquake—in low-resolution versions that can be printed in the field with basic equipment. The goal is always the same: to provide reliable information to those who need to save lives.
When the Emergency Hits Close to Home
Disasters don’t always happen thousands of kilometers away. In 2016, the Amatrice earthquake shook the very walls of the e-GEOS headquarters in Rome.
“Many colleagues had relatives and friends in the affected towns, and we all felt the tremor,” recalls Luzietti. The personal and geographic proximity made that work even more intense, with days and nights devoted without pause to providing updated maps and data to the rescuers.
A Journey Through Italian Space
The story of the e-GEOS Emergency Room kicks off Space Panorama, a science outreach series promoted by Fondazione Leonardo ETS, in collaboration with e-GEOS and Telespazio.
It is a ten-episode journey to discover space innovations born in Italy, through the voices of professionals who transform satellite technology into practical tools that serve people every single day.