Disaster Sheltering | One Concern

Cities need tools to help them make timely and relevant sheltering decisions.

Emergency leaders need to provide immediate temporary sheltering to significant numbers of people in safe and accessible locations - immediately before, during and after a natural disaster.

Challenge

Many cities use existing risk maps to pre-identify possible sheltering locations, in order to ensure that these locations will be adequate in the event of an evacuation.

While this is a sound practice, these maps are often antiquated, and - more importantly - static. Relying solely on this practice without considering the dynamics of the actual, evolving disaster can result in the need to rapidly identify new shelters, as locations presumed to be available may be either damaged or inaccessible.

This issue can cause mass confusion for the public, and wastes limited time and resources of emergency management departments in critical situations.

Solution

One Concern’s solution generates impact predictions for specific events, at a block-by-block level.

Before a disaster strikes, these projections can help leaders assess the likelihood of damage and accessibility in multiple disaster scenarios, providing greater confidence in pre-disaster shelter identification.

Following a disaster (or immediately prior), One Concern’s solution allows leaders to re-assess each shelter location within the specific dynamics of the incident, expediting life-saving decisions and disaster relief operations.

Use Cases