Are you flood ready?
Taking on that important question helps a team led by Centre Researcher Catherine Kim to make it to the finals of the 2023 Disaster Challenge.
The Disaster Challenge is a national challenge designed to encourage new research and innovative solutions to tackle the difficult problems Australia faces with some of its natural hazards. Catherine’s team was one of three finalists in the competition hosted by Natural Hazards Research Australia (NHRA). The team’s project focused on developing a spatially explicit flood vulnerability index for Brisbane City.
“The impacts of flooding go beyond just whether someone’s home is flooded or not. Many people and communities are vulnerable to flooding impacts with businesses being forced to close, services getting cut off, and roads flooding. Or it could be something as simple and important as not being able to reach a family member,” says Catherine, who is co-lead of the QUT Centre for Data Science’s Environment and Natural Systems Domain.
“Using data science, this project aims to show how sensitive communities are to flooding and to what extent they have the capacity to adapt in the face of flood events.”
This research started in early 2022, during the height of the Brisbane floods. A team of researchers in the QUT Centre for Data Science understood the importance of capturing data as the flooding event was going on. Dr Kate Saunders and Dr Kate Helmstedt quickly organised and ran a rapid response hackathon. Dubbing themselves and the other hackathon participants as the Digital Mud Army, they concentrated efforts on how they could collect and use the many types of data sources on the flooding.
Over the last 18 months, the research evolved to take on the question of flood vulnerability. The team held workshops with councils, government, and disaster organisations, and non-profits.
“It became clear from everyone we talked to is that people need clear and concise information that will help them to not only act during a crisis, but also help them prepare in advance for it,” says Catherine.
To that end, the team has begun development of an app. It’s called “FloodReady”, and it’s designed to be simple and interactive tool that gives people an immediate result of how vulnerable they are to a flooding event. The app backend is based on a spatially explicit map incorporating three components flood extent, population demographics, and services like petrol stations and shops.
“The FloodReady app will create personalised recommendations about how a person should prepare for flooding based on where they live and their personal circumstances. Understanding flood risk will help a person respond more quickly during a flooding event, and recover faster after it,” says team member Dr Richard Cottrell, from the Universities of Queensland and Tasmania.
The app aims to tackle one of the biggest challenges during a flooding event which is the flood of information and data that can be overwhelming for most people. Using cutting edge Data Science, it pulls together the publicly available, but scattered, data to give its users a more complete and personalised picture of their vulnerability to flooding.
Most importantly, though, the team hopes the app will spur people to prepare in advance.
“The Australian Red Cross tells us that people who prepare for emergency events are more confident with the decisions they make, are less stressed during a disaster, and recover far quicker than those who poorly understood their risks,” says Richard.
The NHRA Disaster Challenge ended with the team being named as one of the two runner-ups. They were awarded $2,000 as a prize.
“To be finalists in the Challenge gives us the confidence to that others see value in our idea and that this a concept worth pursuing,” says Catherine.
The team plans to test ‘FloodReady’ on the data-rich case study that is Brisbane city but aims to make this scalable to other flood-affected areas around Australia.
In addition to Catherine and Richard, the team includes Kaitlyn Brown, Dr Aiden Price and Tace Stewart from the QUT Centre for Data Science; Dr Kate Saunders, formerly of the QUT Centre for Data Science and now with Monash University; and Dr Jess Hopf from Oregon State University. The team has been mentored by QUT academics A/Prof Kate Helmstedt and A/Prof Connie Susilawati.
Congratulations, team! We look forward to seeing this project continue to move forward.