FEMA, Accommodating Evacuated People
Colorado School Of Mines, Fall 2020
Problem Statement
Responding American Red Cross teams and Emergency Managers need a way to safely accommodate evacuated individuals when neighboring towns and standard practices are not an option in order to avoid the spread of COVID-19 and save people from natural disasters.
Problem Scoping and Discovery
Based on extensive customer interviews, the team re-scoped the problem to focus on providing timely disaster relief information to assist individuals who might voluntarily and preemptively evacuate from a danger zone if they were provided timely and accessible information.
Outcome
The team developed an MVP in the form of a Tableau dashboard that provides live updates on local wildfires, pulling in information from across multiple sources. The dashboard provides: a timeline of updates, a map featuring locations of interest, and an embedded Google Map that provides directions.
Results / Next Steps
The dashboard has been presented to Emergency Managers within Colorado receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback. Request for future development included personalization of relevant information at the county level and implementation of a web-scraping tool to provide live updates.