By Gail Dutton
Keeping people safe from hurricanes, tsunamis, and other natural disasters just got easier - which is good news, since this is National Hurricane Week! Thanks to some innovative desktop apps working behind the scenes, emergency planners in local governments can access the latest scientific environment and population models interactively. Using them, they can run scenarios, adjust variables, and prioritize their own disaster recovery plans.
Coastal Resilience App
Oyster reefs, dunes, and marshes can lessen the impact of hurricanes on coastal shorelines and infrastructure if they’re properly placed, says Michael Beck, Ph.D., lead marine scientist at the
Coastal Resilience Apps developed by the Nature Conservancy and some 30 partners provide the scientific tools to position projects, as well as to prioritize restoration or mitigation areas.
The Coastal Defense App is one example. It’s being used to design and position oyster reefs. “Designing an oyster reef to mitigate risks (like storm surge or wave action) is different than typical oyster reef restoration,” Beck says. Reefs built for risk mitigation will be higher in the water column and broader across the top to reduce erosion and flooding, and they’ll be nearer to populations, he explains.
Other Coastal Resilience Apps “helped natural hazard managers in Connecticut map areas before Hurricanes Irene and Sandy. In Oxnard, California, they provided the justification for a moratorium on power plants in low-lying coastal areas,” Beck says.
“We’re working with engineers and insurers to design projects that reduce communities’ exposure to erosion and flooding,” he says. Doing that requires also providing risk managers access to tools and information to help them consider the role of coastal habitats in their plans. “By better understanding the risks, they can develop solutions to coastal hazards like storms and sea level rise.”
Pedestrian Evacuation App
In the Pacific Northwest, residents and tourists fleeing tsunamis are more likely to find safety rather than danger, thanks to the Pedestrian Evacuation App developed by U.S. Geologic Service.
The Cascadia Subduction Zone, just offshore, parallels the coast for 1,000 kilometers, from Canada to northern California. It’s capable of megaquakes of 9.0 and the mega-tsunamis that accompany them. Residents of these towns have long said, only half in jest, that if “the big one strikes,” they’re dead.
The Pedestrian Evacuation App is improving their chances of survival by showing emergency planners how little time populations actually would have to evacuate communities where there is often only one road out. Consequently, more beach towns are building towers – vertical evacuation structures – in low-lying areas to protect their populations.
“The tool can be used in any coastal community,” but is best for relatively rural populations, says Jeanne Jones, the USGS geographer who led the software development. “It was designed for evacuation analysis from sudden-onset hazards, like tsunamis, flash floods, and volcanic lahars where organized evacuations are not possible, and people would flee on foot, cross-country.”
The Pedestrian Evacuation app runs on desktop computers as an extension for ArcMap commercial mapping software. It is designed for geographic information system users, Jones explains.
Community Resilience
The Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) model, developed by Hacker League, assesses climate-related hazards for each U.S. county, the effects of those changes, and ways to make cities more resilient.
The model considers 28 socioeconomic and environmental variables that affect vulnerability and adaptability. Users can click by county to identify the most frequent and most damaging hazards. The app is considered 90 percent accurate.
These scientific apps work behind the scenes, before disasters, to help reduce their impacts and to give people the best chance of survival. Maybe, with their help, you won’t need your own mobile survival app.
Additional Reading:
1. Hurricane Sandy's Test: More Than Just Disaster Recovery Video
2. For National Hurricane Preparedness Week, A Disaster Recovery Planning Checklist
3. Don’t Be Fooled By These 5 Reasons Why Disaster Recovery Plans Fail
Sungard Availability Service Core Solution: Disaster Recovery
