Disaster mitigation by crowdsourcing hazard documentation

Natural disasters can cripple communities in many ways, including cutting off access to power and water. Documenting and resolving hazards, such as, broken utility poles prior to such disasters can mitigate the damage caused by them. However, this task involves time and resource-intensive manual labor: considerable amount of well-trained municipal staff are needed. Our work showed that, with a crowdsourcing approach, even a very simple mobile app could make large-scale volunteer effort practical. Our application instructed the user step by step through the needed tasks to document an identified hazard. Each documented hazard was then automatically uploaded to a server. Such approach allowed nearly real-time coordination, and prevented duplicated effort. We cooperated with a local township, helping them to use our system to document hazards in their township. The volunteers recorded 349 distinct hazards in eight days. In total, eight volunteers participated. After a short period of training, all volunteers were able to complete the documentation tasks without issues, even though most of them were not familiar with the system before. With the collected data, the township committee was able to bring in utility companies to review and fix all of potential hazards before the hurricane season in 2014. This operation created a large positive impact for the township.