DisastersOpen data sources can help localities prepare for disasters

States and local governments must improve their use of open-data sources to prepare for disasters, according to a trio of emergency management experts from academia, government, and the private sector. At a Atlantic CityLab summit, the experts agreed that public data reveals an increasing need for infrastructure upgrades in U.S. cities, but local governments tend to adopt short-term measures over long-term protections.

Lucy Jones, a seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is working with Los Angeles to draft a seismic-resilience plan. Jones acknowledged the city’s enormous data collection, but points out that the city has failed to use the data to invest in disaster preparation. In one example, 85 percent of Los Angeles’s water supply is delivered by aqueducts across the southern San Andreas Fault- a fault line, which is expected to generate a major earthquake sometime in the next decade or so. Data has shown that city aqueducts will likely break during the earthquake, leaving only a six-month supply of water reserves for residents. Experts believe it would take eighteen months to repair the aqueducts, so residents would have to spend a year without a reliable water source.

“When the San Andreas earthquake happens in Southern California — and that’s the most likely big earthquake in the U.S.— we know that all of the transportation lifelines, the electric systems, the water systems, the gas lines that cross the San Andreas fault, exactly where they’ll break and what will happen when they break,” Jones said. “(Yet) that hasn’t gotten anybody to do anything about them.” The data available now could help the city expand its capacity for water reserves, Jone said.

Government Technology reports that some lawmakers believe that major disasters are too infrequent to justify large projects dedicated to disaster protection. Brian Wolshon, a professor of civil engineering at Louisiana State University, pointed out, however, that evacuations of 1,000 people or more occur every two weeks somewhere in the United States. Wolshon added that emergency resilience projects do not have to be isolated from other building and infrastructure projects. “We can look to see how we can integrate this overall idea of community resilience into that overall frame work,” Wolshon said. “That’s not something that costs a lot of money that’s just changing mindsets.”

A primary reason local governments ignore long-term investments in emergency management tools is the belief that the expenditures fail to serve immediate needs. Brian Fishman, a representative with Palantir Technologies, a provider of data management platforms for disaster relief and humanitarian work, pointed out that city data can be used for other challenges outside of emergency management. “Data is just information combined together so that it informs decisions,” Fishman said. “When you put that information into a common format you’re going to use it in a million ways not just for resilience. You’re going to use it to find water pipes that need to be replaced. You’re going to use it to survey buildings for code violations and not just susceptibility of earthquakes.”

On how emergency management projects can be utilized daily, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency and tech startup Appallicious launched the Disaster Assessment and Assistance Dashboard (DAAD) to help citizens seeking services during and after major disasters. The platform, free to local governments and customizable at scaled costs, helps link local residents to businesses and government agencies. Skills, services, and equipment needed during disasters can also be shared throughout the year. “What we’ve really learned and what we’ve seen over and over again, is the old adage ‘that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ and ‘failing to plan is really planning for failure,’” said Wolshon.