RAPID: Collaborative Research: Building Digital Infrastructure and Communities to Assess Risk of Drinking Water Hazards Caused by Hurricanes

After a hurricane, responders need information to address immediate human needs. Among the most important needs is to ensure that drinking water is not contaminated by flooding or system failure. Information is also needed to learn from past events to reduce the impacts in the future. This project will compile environmental and related information from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and Hurricane Florence in North Carolina to create a cohesive data system. A web platform will enable the sharing of these data to help understand how hurricanes and flooding impact physical and digital infrastructure. Increased public access to environmental and health data will help communities prevent drinking water contamination to protect human health, as well as plan for future events.

Impacts from hurricanes and floods are increasing; there is growing interest by communities to engage in research with outcomes usable to protect and educate themselves against water hazards. The recovery period is an important opportunity to engage the public in research to assess drinking water related health risks and better prepare for future water security for the most vulnerable populations. This project will create a synthesized data and software system to advance our understanding of how digital and physical infrastructure information reduce the impact of disasters using an integrated collaborative platform for ongoing research. Current data collection includes assessment of data and cyberinfrastructure needs as well as training for archiving new datasets for Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Maria. Datasets include hurricane observations, flood maps, storm track forecasts, National Water Model forecasts, de-identified drinking water quality sampling, and other public data sources including from non-profit, government, and open and crowd-sourced datasets. The hydrologic research community repository, HydroShare, will provide a point of access for research findings, with interoperability designed to link to data models and repositories used by natural hazards, environmental health, and environmental engineering communities in a consistent, documented format. Networks disaster coordination data collection and information dissemination are sharing educational tools to generate analyses and visualization of hurricane impacts to address ongoing needs and prepare for the next hurricane season. Public user engagement, research community support, and ongoing software operations and maintenance are key to continuous development and usability of the analysis tools and datasets. Our study uses Hurricanes Florence and Maria datasets and case studies from North Carolina and Puerto Rico to improve how we share knowledge and build capacity to support communities around the world who may use digital infrastructure to foster self-resiliency.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.