CoMaps guided earthquake rescuers offline in Venezuela with no cell signal
During the response to Venezuela's earthquake, CoMaps volunteer and co-founder Anton Wenemoser went into what responders were calling ground zero, the hardest-hit area, a zone with no cell coverage. He already had the offline navigation app CoMaps on his phone. "CoMaps turned out to be really useful for me because I entered a zone with no coverage and needed it right away," he recalls.
A few days later he joined a rescue team that had come from El Salvador, firefighters, Civil Protection and several other units, taking instructions from a command center back home. Most of the team did not know CoMaps; only one person on the team had access to a map. Anton started helping with logistics, finding destinations when the command center asked the team to move. Along the way he noticed the team's own map coordinator was using a different, far more limited navigation app, one without the detail that comes from volunteer mapping or the ability to work fully offline. When Anton showed him CoMaps, it was, in his own words, "a discovery he loved making."
CoMaps is built on OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, map data edited collaboratively "something like Wikipedia," as Anton puts it. It is non-commercial, fully open source, and designed to work 100% offline once a region's map is downloaded, relying only on the phone's GPS. For much of its first year, though, updating those maps took days: turning raw OSM data into ready-to-use maps needed a powerful server, and every map update also depended on an app update, which meant waiting on app-store review.
That changed before anyone needed it to. In April, co-founders Anton Wenemoser and Bastian Greshake Tzovaras presented CoMaps to the Geospatial Tech Working Group of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). Between April and the earthquake, the team decoupled map updates from app updates and moved to a more powerful server, cutting the time to process raw OSM data into ready maps from 10 days to about 3. The result was fresh map data released every week, for the whole planet. So when HOT's Emilio Mariscal reached out asking for fresh maps of Venezuela, CoMaps was already generating one, built in part from thousands of buildings that HOT volunteers had mapped through its Tasking Manager.
Celine Jacquin, HOT's Latin America Senior Manager, said the two organizations had a direct dialogue that pushed CoMaps, an everyday-use app whose focus is not emergencies, to update its base and navigation maps with total regularity following the rhythm of emergency mapping on OSM, rather than a few times a month as before. That let organizations without the technical capacity to download and analyze OSM data themselves, including Techo and the Red Cross, see fresh mapping quickly inside a navigation app they could actually use for logistics on the ground.
The CoMaps team works as volunteers. Today, when an emergency hits, they can prioritize an update for the affected region and have new maps ready to download in the field about 35 hours later. Their longer-term goal is region-specific updates every 12 hours, instead of one weekly update for the entire planet, though no timeline for reaching that has been announced.
Key facts
- Volunteer and CoMaps co-founder Anton Wenemoser used the offline, OpenStreetMap-based app to navigate a zone with no cell coverage while helping a rescue team from El Salvador during Venezuela's earthquake response.
- Between April and the earthquake, CoMaps and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) decoupled map updates from app updates and upgraded servers, cutting the time to process raw OSM data into ready-to-use maps from 10 days to about 3.
- CoMaps now releases fresh, worldwide OSM-based map data every week; for Venezuela this meant maps already incorporating thousands of buildings mapped by HOT Tasking Manager volunteers.
- During an active emergency, the CoMaps team can now prioritize a region and have updated maps ready to download in the field about 35 hours later.
- HOT's Latin America Senior Manager Celine Jacquin said the faster update cadence let organizations without OSM technical skills, including Techo and the Red Cross, use CoMaps for on-the-ground logistics.
Why it matters
It is a concrete case of a volunteer-built, open-source tool changing outcomes in a live disaster response: an app built for everyday offline navigation, not for emergency specialists, ended up carrying humanitarian-grade map data into a zone where cell networks were down and specialist tools were absent. The story also shows what a months-long technical fix, decoupling map updates from app-store-gated app updates, does when the disaster it was built for actually arrives.
Who it affects
Rescue teams operating without connectivity, humanitarian organizations that lack the technical capacity to process OpenStreetMap data themselves (the article names Techo and the Red Cross), the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team's own coordination work, and the volunteer OSM mapping community whose building-by-building work fed directly into the maps used on the ground in Venezuela.
How to use it
CoMaps is free, non-commercial and fully open source, built on OpenStreetMap data. A user downloads the map for a region in advance; once downloaded, the app works fully offline using only the phone's GPS, no cell signal or internet needed. Under normal operation it refreshes map data for the whole planet weekly; during a declared emergency the CoMaps team can prioritize a specific region and get an updated map ready to download in the field in about 35 hours.
How solid is it
The account comes from HOT's own interview with CoMaps co-founders Anton Wenemoser and Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, corroborated by on-record quotes from two HOT staff members, Emilio Mariscal and Celine Jacquin, who describe the same collaboration from the organization's side. It includes specific, checkable operational figures (the 10-day to 3-day processing improvement, the weekly global update cadence, the 35-hour emergency turnaround). It is a single first-person case study published by one of the two organizations involved, not an independently audited report.
Risks and caveats
The article gives no figures for the earthquake itself, no date, magnitude, casualty count or damage estimate, and no total user or install-base numbers for CoMaps. The name of the more limited app the rescue team's map coordinator had been using is not given. The future goal of 12-hour region-specific updates is stated as a vision with no announced timeline. The system's usefulness in any given disaster still depends on volunteers having already mapped the affected area building by building through HOT's Tasking Manager before the emergency hits.
“CoMaps turned out to be really useful for me because I entered a zone with no coverage and needed it right away.”
— Anton Wenemoser, CoMaps co-founder