Executive Summary

More than 80 natural disasters strike the United States every year, causing extensive property destruction and loss of life. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, works with first responders to support citizens in the preparedness for, response to, protection from , and recovery from all natural disaster hazards. Some of their primary challenges as an organization are their ability and efficiency in responding to disasters as they first occur, as well as how to manage ongoing disasters.

As a disaster first occurs and is ongoing, FEMA officials must determine the businesses and organizations that must receive priority assistance in order to best help citizens during a time of crisis. FEMA developed a framework to better respond to disasters. Utilizing the Lifelines framework, FEMA officials can prioritize and focus response efforts, utilize a common lexicon, facilitate unity of purpose and better communication, and clarify which components of the disaster require cross-sector coordination. The seven lifelines identified are as follows:

1. Safety & Security
2. Food, Water, Sheltering
3. Health & Medical
4. Energy (Power & Fuel)
5. Communications
6. Transportation
7. Hazardous Material

In recent years, the frequency of wildfires in the United States has exponentially increased, with California being one of the main states impacted. In 2018, there were 8,054 fires in California that burned 1,823,152 acres, compared to in 2010, when 6,502 fires burned 108,742 acres. Additionally, there are significant financial and human losses as a result of these fires. In 2018 alone, there were 85 lives lost and a $400 billion impact to the state. San Diego and its surrounding communities in particular have been affected by some of the largest impacting fires in the last two decades. The Cedar fire in October 2003 claimed 273,246 acres, 2,820 structures, and 15 lives from San Diego County. Also in San Diego County, the Witch fire claimed 197,990 acres, 1,650 structures, and 2 lives in October 2007. Both the Cedar and Witch fires are among the top 10 most destructive fires in California's recorded wildfire history.

Problem Statement

The challenge that we set out to address was how we can help FEMA to identify businesses that may have been impacted in a disaster zone, and to which Lifeline those businesses may align. Utilizing this information, we aimed to create a map for visualizing these Lifeline locations in relation to areas that have historically been affected by disasters and areas that are at risk to be affected in the future. We applied this technique to San Diego County, however the idea was to create a method and results that could be carried out for any other location in the United States.

If San Diego County was impacted by a disaster today, what would be the impact?

Process

1. Determine data sources and collect data
2. Align businesses to FEMA Lifelines
3. Map businesses, historical fire perimeters, current fire risk zones
4. Conclusions & Recommendations

Data

• First obtained data from Yelp using Yelp Fusion API
  • Types of queries used: Business Search endpoint
• We wrote code to successfully assign lifelines to the businesses in the San Diego Area from Yelp and later found that we needed information for other kinds of establishments as well
• For this we used the Google Places API
  • Types of queries used: Nearby Search, Text Search
• Code was written with the intent that it would be functional for other future scenarios, and with API keys for each service, a user should be able to make a simple change to search for establishments in any area and get the FEMA lifelines for all of them in a relatively short period of time (30 minutes)
• When obtaining data from both Google and Yelp, we made sure to remove what might be repeated results, since its possible that we can sometimes collect some data that is the same between both sources

Categorizing by Lifeline

ArcGIS web app demo