by a Thinker, Sailor, Blogger, Irreverent Guy from Madras

Mapping Heat Wave Deaths with Mapping Sheets add-on


As per some news reports, India is in the midst of the 5th worst Heat Wave Condition in known human history.  Though conditions have slackened off a little bit, it is still hot enough in the Deccan Plateau where deaths are still being reported due to the extremely hot conditions.  People who have succumbed to the heat are reported to be from the poorer strata, who cannot afford cover from heat, or under the circumstances are forced to risk it.

While we may not be able to do anything about the Heat Wave, which might or might not be due to Global Warming or the El Nino effect, it is a shame that as a nation we are unable to provide decent shelter, at least one nourishing meal, and drinking water under such disastrous conditions.

Just think about it.  If a state or an area is inundated with water due to flooding or rains, the government(s) are only too glad to rush in help.  In case of an earthquake in the neighbouring country, we are ever eager to rush in our National Disaster Response Force (NDRF).  But when large parts of the South-Central India are overwhelmed with heat, the response is left in the hands of the local-state authorities.

To put it in perspective, the Nepal Earthquake killed 8300 people in all.  There are reports of more than 2300 deaths, majority of them in the two states of Andhra Pradesh and Telengana alone, and yet there is only minimal relief effort.

Leaving the governments and their idleness apart, it struck me to map the number of reported deaths on a map.  With that in view I landed up with the Mapping Sheets add-on from theXS.  The Google Sheets add-on allows anyone to plot our own data onto a Google Map with a few clicks.  Thus it was easy for me to plot the Deaths due to Heat Wave onto a Google Map with the Mapping Sheets add-on.

So here is the Google Map with the number of Deaths due to Heat Wave 2015 in each state.  Since that Google Map cannot be embedded into this blog, here is a snapshot.




Isn’t that nice?  And I could do it in under half-an-hour.  Think about what a time saver it is.  All I did was to enter the state names and the number of reported deaths collated from newspapers, which took me about 20 minutes.  Then in a couple of minutes I could generate the map.  The beauty of the Mapping Sheets add-on is that it picks up the coordinates from the State Name column – no need to geocode it in.

The Mapping Sheets add-on is from people at theXS and the how-to documentation is at [http://www.thexs.ca/xsmapping].  The Mapping Sheets add-on itself can be installed from the Google Sheets add-on store at [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mapping-sheets/ddfdjfkaipgeahdjeemdojbpcglcncif?hl=en].

BTW did I mention that it was free?


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