From Hurricanes to Wildfires. Here are the highlights from some of the activations and disaster response situation reports from 2017.
- Flooding California Oroville Spillway situation report 2/13/2017
- Wildfires Panhandle activation summary 04/20/2017
- Earthquake M7.1 – Puebla Mexico situation report
- Hurricane Harvey – Texas situation report 8/25/2017
- Hurricane Irma – Florida situation report 9/10/2017
- Hurricane Irma – Florida physical deployment 10/4/2017
- Hurricane Maria – Caribbean situation report 10/6/2017
- Hurricane Maria – Puerto Rico situation report 10/6/2017
- Train derailment, Amtrak501 public response 12/18/2017
- M6.5 Earthquake – 0km ESE of Cipatujah public response 12/15/2017
- M6.0 Earthquake – 64km NNE of Kerman public response 12/12/2017
- Wildfires, southern California public response 12/5/2017
Yachtaid Global Caribbean Relief Response
Update November 3
Fifteen islands and 40 million people were in the path of Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Humanity Road is partnering with YachtAid Global to assist them in providing disaster relief to Caribbean Islands affected by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. We are supporting information needs in the Caribbean to include a variety of tasks to help unmet needs. The activation is for approximately 2 weeks beginning November 3, 2017. Please follow us and share, like and retweet!
Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico
Update October 6, 2017
The 2017 hurricane season has brought widespread destruction and impacted lives of people and animals across Caribbean nations, US Virgin Islands, Florida, Puerto Rico and Gulf USA states. Humanity Road has been providing situation reports to the public and our governmental and non-governmental aid partners who are responding. In addition to supporting lifesaving rescue needs, Humanity Road has routed urgent unmet medical needs for Florida and Puerto Rico to aid providers. For Puerto Rico, we published and shared two special reports on the status of widespread communications outages following Hurricane Maria.
Hurricane Irma Florida
In Florida, we deployed a physical response to Big Pine Key to support the area most devastated by Hurricane Irma. While in Big Pine Key, we met Jessica, who graciously donated food prepared for her wedding reception to assist those in need. Not only did she supply the food, but she and her family served the meal to the happy residents and then her family continued to support relief efforts at Big Pine Key. Thank you Jessica! Read more about our deployment to Big Pine Key.
2017 Hurricane Triple Punch Response
Update October 6, 2017
Humanity Road has been providing situational information support to disaster response agencies, official and the general public impacted by catastrophic hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. We are collaborating with many partners and we appreciate their support. By the Numbers – Here is where your support has helped the public through Humanity Road programs in the past 14 days;
- Texas – 8.9 million people
- Caribbean – 14 countries – 30 million people
- Florida – 20 million people
Our hearts go out to all of those impacted by these severe storms. We are here. And we are listening. Because no call for help should go unheard. A very special thank you to our volunteers who have been working non stop, day and night in the past 20 days, to help in this difficult time.
In September our “Hurricane Palooza” responses continued and included monitoring for Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose, and Katia. Humanity Road published four special situation reports for Caribbean nations impacted by Hurricane Irma including a special report on the medical and health situation based on early indications in social media.
While monitoring and responding to multiple hurricanes, another situation report was published for the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that struck Puebla, Mexico on September 21, 2017.
Our Response To Hurricane Harvey
Since Harvey made landfall on Aug 24, The team responded for 13 days and have been working on assisting with rescues of those impacted. They have data mined information for situational reporting on the geographic coastal area of Texas that has a combined population of approximately 8,732,935 and Twitter traffic averaged 6.5 million tweets daily. We had a team of 50 volunteers. 37 volunteers from 8 states and 7 countries with an additional 13 translators from Translators without Borders.
Digital volunteers from the Digital Humanitarian Network have been working around the clock to support those impacted by Hurricane Harvey. Following catastrophic impacts from Hurricane Harvey and excessive flooding, Standby Task Force, Translators without Borders and Humanity Road have activated via the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) charter to provide support to first response agencies and working with cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy to support crisis mapping information needs.
Hurricane Harvey hit the Gulf Coast of the United States as a Category 4 storm around 9:45pm local time (US Central Time Zone / -5 UTC) Friday night August 25th. Residents of the state of Texas are experiencing the most powerful storm in 56 years. Extreme wind, and heavy rains have impacted a broad area, and by the time the storm ends, some areas may see more than 50 inches of rain, forecasters said.
The DHN organizations are providing support to identify and report urgent unmet needs . The DHN was activated on Sunday August 27, 2017. The Standby Task Force (http://standbytaskforce.org/), Humanity Road https://humanityroad.org/ and Humanity Road tapped Translators without Borders (https://translatorswithoutborders.org/), Help Earth Foundation (http://helpearthfoundation.org) also stepped forward to help with Hazmat needs. The solution organizations quickly formed inter-disciplinary teams to meet the urgent information needs of those affected by this major event. Below is more information about each of these members.
We collaborated in a multitude of coordination portals with the Tech sector, the medical sector, the private sector, the Digital Humanitarian Network, Standby Task Force, Health Care Ready, Americares, Help Earth Foundation, US Army National Guard, U.S. Coast Guard, Northcom, Arizona State University, Texas State University The team put in amazing hours and broke some new ground here are just a few.
US Coast Guard Rescue Mapping – Coast Guard Academy Cadet Evan Twarog shows a heat map on a computer work station in the Geographic Information System (GIS) lab in the academy’s Smith Hall on Friday, Sept. 1, 2017. Twarog and a classmate have been using GIS to track and map social media calls of distress from the areas in Texas affected by Hurricane Harvey. (Sean D. Elliot/The Day)