Clarity Amidst Chaos – How AI is Enhancing Emergency Preparedness

Clarity Amidst Chaos – How AI is Enhancing Emergency Preparedness
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Team Organizations	One Concern Inc; San Francisco CA; Alameda County CA
Team Leaders	Mike Dayton
Participating Municipalities	Alameda County CA
Status
Document	None

Description

SF Bay area Emergency Managers and One Concern have joined together to provide the power of AI to California emergency responders. ‘Seismic Concern’ uses artificial intelligence and state of art earthquake engineering research to provide emergency managers with damage maps and statistics in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake, enhancing situational awareness required for rescue and relief efforts. Moreover, through the ‘Seismic Concern Training Module’, emergency operations centers will be able to design and train on realistic scenarios based on actual simulations to get a real sense of the situation. One Concern will demonstrate their capability to predict the extent of damage to personal residences, commercial and government building as well as other critical infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area Region, as well as the capability of the training/simulation module to aid resiliency and mitigation efforts. SF DEM will demonstrate how One Concern’s technology will enhance immediate response and recovery efforts and will use their simulations to quantify mitigation efforts and develop accurate scenarios for emergency responders.

Challenges

The challenge this team is addressing is the lack of situational awareness in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake and the inability of emergency responders to efficiently prioritize the deployment of scarce resources to the places which need them the most.

Solutions

The solution would provide much needed clarity to emergency responders by predicting the city blocks where damage was most severe, specifically helping them target vulnerable and disabled populations. From the resiliency point of view, One Concern would enable trainings based on realistic scenarios affecting the jurisdiction, and help SF DEM train, plan and move towards building a smarter and more resilient city.

Major Requirements

1. Develop regional team with representatives from public safety, public health, utilities, public works and transportation sectors.
2. Identify critical infrastructure according to each community and produce results that are the most actionable for emergency responders.
3. Enable the response prioritization platform to incorporate any additional databases provided by the jurisdiction.
4. Demonstrate capabilities during the Urban Shield/Yellow Command and Fleet Week.
5. Use simulations during Cal OES’s capstone exercise in 2017.

Performance Targets

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Measurement Methods

Reduce the time for situational awareness after an earthquake from several hours/days to around 30 minutes (currently done through windshield tours, requiring personnel to carry out street by street reconnaissance). Simulate three earthquake simulations and identify three (3) areas in the city which are vulnerable to damage and require special attention (like identify areas which have considerable senior population and would suffer building collapse; or identify residential areas which have considerable low income population and would need immediate repairs, etc) Given resource data, devise optimal response priorities and resource allocation strategies for earthquakes on a specific fault.

Annual exercises and quarterly simulations will demonstrate the KPIs.

Standards, Replicability, Scalability, and Sustainability

Seismic Concern is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform and will not require any server setup to be performed. Server setup is performed by One Concern and viability tests are performed with each user. One Concern, Inc. has robust security and DevOps, and the systems are available and reliable at any time. Our systems are also highly scalable and ready to handle increased response. Our 100% virtualized environment allows us to scale up or down to meet changing needs. State-of-the-art monitoring, control and storage systems are used to protect programs and to ensure security, availability, privacy and confidentiality.

Impacts

This project will provide life, safety, and financial benefit to the public by providing emergency responders the situational awareness that will accelerate rescue efforts and ensure efficient distribution of resources to the most critical areas.

Demonstration/Deployment

• Phase I Pilot/Demonstration:

Simulation building damages suffered by a variety of earthquake types in California.

• Phase II Deployment:

Simulation building damages suffered by a variety of earthquake types in the U.S.A. Also, demonstrate of how simulations and exercises using this technology have enhanced preparation for response and recovery efforts.