Hazard Identification and Assessment Tools

Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System: or GDACS is a joint initiative of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the European Commission that serves to consolidate and disseminate disaster-related information. GDACS collects near real-time hazard information and combines this with demographic and socio-economic data to perform mathematical analysis of the expected impact. This is based on the magnitude of the event and possible risk for the population. 

ShakeCast: The U.S. Geological Survey ShakeCast system provides rapid estimates of the severity and extent of earthquake shaking. Short for ShakeMap Broadcast, ShakeCast is a fully automated, open-source system for delivering specific ShakeMap products to critical users and for triggering established post-earthquake response protocols. ShakeCast allows utilities, transportation agencies, and other large organizations to automatically determine the shaking value at their facilities, set thresholds for notification of damage states (typically green, yellow, and red) for each facility and then automatically notify (via pager, cell phone, or email) specified operators, inspectors, and others within their organizations responsible for those particular facilities in order to prioritize inspection and response. 

CUSEC Critical Infrastructure template: provides a model for states to align their Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources (CIKR) data to FEMA’s seven Community Lifelines and CISA’s 16 critical infrastructure sectors to help monitor infrastructure status across a state, develop CIKR status reports, and to prioritize infrastructure to support response, recovery, and mitigation efforts.

The CUSEC Safety Evaluation App: a mobile data collection tool for performing post-disaster safety evaluations of buildings (i.e. ATC-20 or 45). Local and State governments can use the tool to record structural damage and provide situational awareness.

CUSEC’s Rapid Visual Screening (RVS) App: is suite of tools which help identify buildings that may be potentially vulnerable to earthquake shaking. The RVS App is based on FEMA’s P-154 RVS methodology, 3rd Edition.