ERD Resources
Resources developed for ERD
A variety of tools utilizing many different datasets have been developed to assist Episcopal Relief and Development in their disaster efforts.
Chronic Inundation
The Union of Concerned Scientists developed a spreadsheet of chronically inundated properties by zipcode, climate scenario, and year. The data we are working with here looks at chronic inundation (flooding at least 26 times per year), usually high-tide flooding.
The source of the data is from the USCS website.
Preparing the data is documented here.
Sea Level Rise
Here an app was developed that overlays sea level rise models from NOAA, FEMA Flood Insurance Claim data, and demographic information from the US Census.
The NOAA data is stored as rasters, at a spatial resolution of 10 meters, every 6 inches of sealevel rise from zero to ten feet. This is a lot of data. To make it more digestible, I took the median value converting the files to 100 meter resolution. The NOAA data may be found at this site.. I used the Depth Rasters.
For the FEMA flood insurance claims, I download the files from here. One big advantage of the flood claim data is that it is coded by census block group, unlike much other data which is coded at the census tract or zip code level. The downside is that many opeople may not have flood insurance - especially the poor. In fact, about half of the claims are for what appear to be vacation homes.
I used the census data for the 2020 census, which sadly has well-known limitations due to Covid, but it is what we have.
FEMA Flood Insurance Claims
The previous app only has the FEMA claim data for areas that are predicted to be impacted by sea level rise. But it seems like it would be good to have a look at all the flood insurance claims, even those away from the coast.
The FEMA data came from the same source as before, as did the census data. But this time I also added data on social vulnerability. The data had been deleted from the CDC website in response to an Executive Order, but fortunately, a team at the Drexel School of Public Health had written an “R” package for generating the Social Vulnerability Indicies.
I also took the opportunity to rework the underlying engine so that I could add new capabilites, which I plan to add to the sea level app, someday. Specifically, the user can bring up a Google map and a FEMA flood map covering the area being displayed, and can also create a pdf report for the chosen census block group. The idea being that it should be easy to document interesting areas that need further examination. I also plan to add a bookmarking capability, so that one could quickly flag areas to revisit later.
LA Fires
A quick and dirty project was to develop a tool to quickly evaluate the fire damage in LA from the Eaton and Palisades fires, and overlay poverty data. Fortunately, California has a very robust data infrastructure, and were providing daily updates of fire damage, structure-by-structure, as people were able to get into the area and evaluate the damage.
Quarto is an excellent tool for quickly creating simple web apps, so that is what I used for this one.