USA: Disaster relief is dangerously broken. Can AI fix it?

Source(s): Fast Company, Mansueto Ventures, LLC

By Katharine Schwab

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The sad state of emergency response

Emergency planners have little technology to work with when it comes to understanding what is happening during a disaster. For floods, many emergency planners rely on static risk maps, which model the flow of water by assuming that rain is falling constantly everywhere. These maps are based on the probability that a flood will happen in any given year: A 100-year risk map has a 1% risk of happening, while a 500-year risk map has a .2% annual probability. These models never change, even as dams burst and flood water reshapes entire neighborhoods. Emergency response teams often react based on what 911 calls come in, with little data to help prioritize resources on a city-wide level.

But this process is outdated. “We’ve had four of what they call 500-year events in 20 years,” says Tom Bacon, the chairman of the Houston Parks board who is not affiliated with One Concern but has thoroughly examined the software. “Each time we’re reinventing the process for recovery, reinventing the process for solutions going forward, and we’re not using either historical information or maintaining an accurate record of the current conditions in order to make the best decisions about how we invest. That’s simply because the ability of static databases to understand these fast-changing cities is so limited.”

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Other companies are trying to tackle these problem using AI. Like One Concern, Geospiza uses data to create city-specific action plans for a variety of disasters using a map-based interface. The nonprofit Field Innovation Team is using machine learning to predict what people in shelters will need post-disaster. Microsoft is getting into the game too, with a recent announcement that it will be investing in AI tech related to disaster response. But One Concern has heavy hitters in the emergency management industry on board, including Craig Fugate, former head of FEMA under Obama, and Greg Brunelle, who headed up New York State’s emergency management agency. The company also focuses on releasing separate tools for each type of disaster rather than a blanket AI that can handle all of them.

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Mitigating disasters when climate change comes knocking

Organizing emergency teams in the immediate aftermath of a disaster is crucial. But so is long-term emergency planning, especially since disasters will become more severe and more frequent in many parts of the United States. One Concern has a mode where officials can run thousands of simulations to understand their city’s weaknesses so they can retrofit buildings and plan how to distribute resources before disaster strikes. “They get an understanding of how does this building or this resource look as compared to this other building or other resource on an annualized aggregated damage level for all the possible scenarios of earthquakes,” Wani says.

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Hazards Earthquake Flood
Country and region United States of America
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