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A series of earthquakes struck southwestern Puerto Rico the week of January 5, 2020, the largest registering at 6.4 magnitude. The National Alliance for Public Safety GIS Foundation (NAPSG) requested support from GISCorps & CEDR Digital Corps volunteers to mine social media and news outlets for images of on-the-ground conditions in the affected area and upload them to an interactive web map. The map provided valuable situational awareness to federal, regional and local emergency managers. Thanks to daily communications with the federal Crowdsourcing Unit and other on-the-ground organizations, GISCorps volunteers were able to focus their efforts on high-priority areas of the island and FEMA Community Lifelines of particular concern to map users.

2020 Disasters Crowdsourced Photos Dashboard being used to brief federal emergency managers & government officials (via Twitter: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1216412542332997633)

In addition to affording volunteers an opportunity to support emergency managers and Puerto Ricans affected by the earthquakes, this mission provided NAPSG Foundation staff and members of the GISCorps Hurricane Admin Team (whose name should now be changed to the GISCorps Disaster Admin Team!) an opportunity to test the new configuration of applications that they had been developing for the 2020 hurricane season. The new configuration employs a customized Survey123 upload form to help standardize data entry and to capture additional information that hadn’t been possible to collect with the previous system. Once each photo upload is vetted for relevance and accuracy, it is displayed in a photo gallery in the new Attachment Viewer configurable app. Over the course of the mission, additional web apps and dashboards were developed to meet user needs, and a Hub site was created to present all of the products for this mission in a single repository. Due to the short notice of this volunteer request and because of the new workflows that were being tested, GISCorps limited the recruitment to volunteers who had participated in similar missions in 2019.


2020 Disasters Crowdsourced Volunteer Workflow

With help from an automated feed of tweets developed by CEDR Digital Corps, GISCorps volunteers were able to find, geolocate, and post relevant photos and descriptive information using the survey. Then the Admin Team vetted each photo and assigned it a primary Community Lifeline based on FEMA’s criteria.

Admin photo vetting application

Over the course of the 3-week activation, 360 photos were posted to the survey by 10 volunteers (with 220 uploads from GISCorps volunteer Keith Johnson!). GISCorps, along with NAPSG Foundation and CEDR Digital Corps, will continue refining the applications as the year progresses in preparation for responding to major disasters affecting the United States and its territories in the future.

Project Complete.

 

 
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