How This Florida City Used ‘Smart Data’ To Stay Ahead Of Hurricane Michael

Public sector teams rely on data to support everything they do, from day-to-day operations to disaster recovery. Learn how technology like real-time data and sensors are critical for efficient emergency management.  

“Emergency management has a lot of moving parts,” says Raimundo Rodulfo, Director of Information Technology for the City of Coral Gables, with a slight sigh of relief now that Hurricane Michael has left this city south of Miami largely unscathed. The same was not true after Hurricane Irma last September. More than 80% of the city was left without power, including police safety buildings, and the debris removal took weeks of clean-up.

Coral Gables has been working on upgrading to a SmartCities Hub which analyzes data and collects it in a central location for easy access. Much of that data has to do with day-to-day operations of the city, but some of it gets called in to service when natural disasters strike. Last week, in advance of Hurricane Michael, they went through their pre-hurricane operations plan to make sure they were ready in case the storm did come their way. One of the many pieces of their preparedness plan is relying on data to support everything they do. Here Rodulfo talks through this un-sung hero inside of emergency management.

State-of-the-Art Mapping

Data isn’t always strictly numbers on a spreadsheet. Maps of critical points in the city are one of the most important pieces of their defense plan. The maps become ‘smartmaps’ when they can overlay one over the other without the system crashing. After Irma, Coral Gables created a debris removal map that showed crews where to prioritize their time during post-hurricane clean-up. It can now merge with other information such as crime data, downed power lines, fire hydrants, flooded streets and evacuated or abandoned properties to give first responders and crews from Public Works the ability to mobilize much more efficiently.

“Teams that were working in the field were able to access those maps from their tablets, mobile computers or from the police or fire mobile units. New technology allows interaction between the users and the systems. We have central databases and those systems update on the cloud [so] that’s why they can be shared on mobile devices,” says Rodulfo.

Sensors

The first line of defense is the sensors in the city’s canals that measure the water levels and send constant updates to emergency management teams so they can monitor overflow.

“Those canals are close to residential areas but they have gates and flooding alleviation mechanisms,” says Rodulfo. “There is a lot of coordination to manage them.”

There are also sensors for water quality that measure ongoing health of the waterways, but if a hurricane – or the stagnant water left in its aftermath – brings about waterborne diseases (as happened during Hurricane Katrina) the sensors measure that too.

The city is also rolling out traffic and pedestrian sensors to monitor downtown traffic even when there isn’t a hurricane. If an evacuation is ordered they now have these in place to estimate what proportion of the city’s 50,000+ population has left the area.

Communication

None of the above could happen if all the teams couldn’t talk to each other or upload their data in real-time. That’s where the un-glamorous, but highly important, ‘smart’ network takes center stage.

“Our network has to be smart enough and has to have different layers of redundancy,” says Rodulfo. “For example if you lose the fiber optics links in one site, you are able to use wireless backup or redundant systems. When everything fails we have satellite communications and cellular communications. There’s free WiFi that businesses can use in certain locations to open their doors after the hurricane.”

Their network design, which received an award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2017, is built to switch automatically from one system to another once a node failure is detected. This is the backbone of their successful emergency operations so that all the first responder crews can communicate without any hiccups. 

The entire goal, as Rodulfo says, is “eliminating gaps, silos and duplication because those systems help people to work in a smarter way.”

 

This article was written by Amy Dobson from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.