August 2006

Hurricane Portal will assist emergency response organizations and the general public. We are all too familiar with the lack of accurate information and the resulting confusion that was prevalent in the days following Hurricane Katrina. RESCUE’s new Hurricane Portal project aims to consolidate information resulting from hurricane damage (or a bombing, or an earthquake, etc.) that emergency response organizations and the general public can take advantage of in the first several days after the event occurs. The portal will bring together pertinent information obtained from TV, radio, Internet blogs and computer simulations and merge the results into a format that will allow a user to make informed decisions. This undertaking is consistent with RESCUE’s goal to radically transform the ability of responding organizations to gather, manage, use, and disseminate information within emergency response networks and to the general public.

Specifically, the portal provides three major benefits.  First, it provides simulation results for wind damage to buildings as well as emergency shelter needs prior to or immediately following landfall of the hurricane. Such data can be used for planning purposes and resource allocation.  The portal also serves as a clearinghouse for eyewitness damage reports via a damage survey, which can be used to validate the simulated results.  Finally, the portal provides a suite of sophisticated search, retrieval, and analysis tools for utilizing web content to provide situational awareness.

As an example, suppose a hurricane is approaching a coastal community. A resident of that community evacuates his home and goes to stay with relatives several hundred miles away. A day or two after the hurricane strikes, the evacuee would like to know whether to return home, what the damage is in his immediate neighborhood, where supplies are available, whether electric power and other utilities are turned on in his neighborhood, etc. Today such specific information is not available from a single radio or TV broadcast, or even from another web site. The aim of the portal is to provide the public with the ability to easily find this information in the first 72 hours following the event.

Disaster analysts representing governments or relief groups such as the Red Cross can use the portal to determine the most affected areas to help them plan where to focus their efforts. Our goal is to use accurate situational awareness provided by this portal to speed recovery efforts following a disaster.

Development of the portal is ongoing; the URL for the current prototype is http://www.disasterportal.org/hurricane

For additional information on this project, please contact Jay Lickfett at jlickfet@uci.edu.