D.C. weathered both the inauguration of Donald Trump and one of the largest political rallies in its history over the weekend, so it might come as no surprise that crowd estimates for each event have become a political issue. Especially since White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told the press corps Saturday that Trump's inauguration was the most widely attended in history, despite aerial photos that show otherwise.
One Falls Church, Va.-based company is looking to clarify at least one side of the political aisle's debate by calculating an official count for Saturday's Women's March on Washington.
Meet Digital Design & Imaging Services, founded by Curt Westergard in the early 2000s. For this project, no one officially asked his company to count the crowds. Westergard and his team just decided to do it as a public service for the press and other involved groups.
"Most people come to us for this without even being selected because we're the only one who does it. So we didn't get a letter and a check that said 'You are officially selected to do a crowd count,'" Westergard told DC Inno in an interview Monday. "We do this because it's a part of my business and because, in general, it's a good thing to do."
Which makes sense because the company didn't start as a crowd estimating business. It's refined the science behind it, but the company started shortly after the 9/11 attacks when airspace became tightly regulated. As a landscape architect, Westergard realized that the way he and others in his field found spaces for new cell towers or estimated how new skyscrapers would alter a city's landscape would need to change. This need turned into the company's current model: weather balloon measurements.
Now, the company has found themselves adding "crowd count analysis services" to their list of offerings. Digital Design & Imaging Services will use a combination of image analysis and land surveying on photos collected by a "tethered aerostat" at about 600 feet above the ground throughout the duration of the Women's March to come to their final estimate. Ryan Shuler, the company's lead photographer and image analyst, will play a huge role in analyzing the images, along with Westergard.
The Women's March isn't their first rodeo, with a resume including Sarah Palin’s “Restoring Honor” protest and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" in 2010. Because airspace is closed during the inaugural, Westerward and his team opted not to try and count the crowd for it.
The bulk of the company's income comes from skyscraper developers, like the ones who built One World Trade Center, who want to see where the line of sight will be for the top floor of proposed buildings. Another portion will come from a new "counter-drone activities," a monitoring service that the company is developing. For the Women's March, which you could say they're doing "pro bono," Westergard said they're just doing it as a public service, and they won't have the official estimate until Wednesday.
"Our goal is to empower other people to make judgments about the density by providing really good data," Westerward said. "Here's our grids, here's our polygons, here's our pictures, you figure it out if you don't like what it is."
Courtesy of Digital Design & Imaging Service.
