RAPID: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Building Infrastructure to Prevent Disasters like Hurricane Maria

There is an urgent need to understand the impacts of severe flooding and infrastructure damage on public health after natural disasters. One limitation to effective disaster response is easy and rapid access to diverse information about available resources, community resource needs, baseline and current environmental conditions. This project aims to expand access to environmental and drinking water quality disaster response and recovery data in a publicly available format using a widely used collaborative online sharing platform named HydroShare. Curating a central repository of assembled data has the potential to greatly facilitate coordinated disaster responses of all types, and improve the monitoring of the recovery process. The project team will prototype this system with an assessment of drinking water, environment, and public health concerns unique to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. By working directly with public water utilities, the project team intends to characterize and map the severity of impaired water resources and distribution systems in Puerto Rico, inform communities about how to protect themselves against hazards specific to their water, and to contribute to rebuilding so the nation is better prepared for future hurricanes. Developing cyber and social infrastructure to understand the dynamics of drinking water contamination after natural disasters will improve disaster preparedness and response, and contribute to efforts across the nation and the world to build for a resilient future.

Recovery efforts from natural disasters can be more efficient with data-driven information on current needs and future risks. This project aims to advance open-source software infrastructure to support scientific investigation and data-driven decision making with a prototype system using a water quality assessment developed to investigate post-Hurricane Maria drinking water contamination in Puerto Rico. The widespread disruption of water treatment processes and uncertain drinking water quality within distribution systems in Puerto Rico poses risk to human health. However, there is no existing digital infrastructure to scientifically determine the impacts of the hurricane to inform a response to the crisis. After every natural disaster, including hurricane Maria, elementary questions on how to provide high quality water supplies and support basic human health are difficult to answer. This project will archive and make accessible data on environmental variables unique to Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria, damage caused by the storm, and will begin to address time sensitive needs of citizens. By working directly with drinking water utilities to collect samples of biological and inorganic drinking water quality, this project aims to generate understanding and awareness of the degree to which drinking water systems were impacted by Hurricane Maria and the status of drinking water infrastructure and emergency recovery in Puerto Rico after the storm. The goal of this project is to advance understanding of how the severity of a hazard to human health (e.g., no access to safe culinary water) is related to the sophistication, connectivity, and operations of the physical and related digital infrastructure systems. By rapidly collecting data in the early stages of recovery, the team plans to test the design of an integrated cyberinfrastructure system to increase the accessibility of environmental and health data for understanding the impacts from hurricane-related natural disasters. The team will test and stress the CUAHSI HydroShare data publication mechanisms and capabilities to (1) assess the spatial and temporal presence of waterborne pathogens in public water systems impacted by a natural disaster, (2) demonstrate usability of HydroShare as a clearinghouse to centralize selected datasets related to Hurricane Maria, and (3) develop a prototype cyberinfrastructure to assess environmental conditions and public health impacted by natural disasters. By rapidly collecting data in the early stages of recovery, The team plans to test the design of an integrated cyberinfrastructure system to increase the accessibility of environmental and health data for understanding the impacts from hurricane-related natural disasters. This work will develop a prototype of a software infrastructure system to advance understanding of how data-driven information can reduce the impacts of natural disaster and serve as a platform for future research. The project thus serves to not only document post-disaster conditions, but develops a process to track the impact of recovery over time, as monitored through health, power availability and water quality.