 Welcome to this meeting of the Geographical Sciences Committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. I'm Pat McDowell, Chair of the Committee. We're glad to have you with us, whether in real time on Zoom or viewing the recording of this session later. Before we begin, I want to say a few words about our committee. The Geographical Sciences Committee is a standing committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The National Academies are nonprofit organizations with a dual mission to honor the nation's top scientists and to provide objective, independent advice on science, technology, engineering, and medicine. The National Academies were established at the direction of President Lincoln and have been providing these services for over 150 years. The Geographical Sciences Committee provides advice to society and to government at all levels using the methods of spatial analysis and representation. We address the geographic dimensions of human environment interactions, spatial location and concentration, and place-based research and policy at all spatial scales. The committee also fosters international cooperation by serving as a liaison to other national geographical organizations, including as the official U.S. liaison to the International Geographical Union. The committee is supported by funding from NSF. These are the current members of the committee. I'd like to pause now and give them an opportunity to unmute and introduce themselves. I'll start. I'm Pat McDowell. I'm a professor emerita at the University of Oregon. Elizabeth? Hi. My name is Elizabeth Root. I'm a professor at the Ohio State University. Dawn? I'm Dawn Wright. I'm a professor at the University of Oregon. I'm an environmental scientist of the Environmental Systems Research Institute, or ESRI, and also courtesy professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University. Janet? Hi. I'm Janet Franklin. I'm in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences at University of California, Riverside. Boodoo. Let's go on to Ben. where I'm a senior policy researcher and director of the Community Health and Environmental Policy Program. Janelle, would you unmute and introduce yourself? Yes, I unfortunately am unable to start my video, but I'm Janelle Lux Hayes. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Glenn. Hello, I'm Glenn McDonald. I'm a professor of geography at UCLA. Okay, and Buddha? I'm also unable to turn on my video, but I am the research division director for Geospatial Science and Human Security at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Great. I think I got everybody. Thank you all. As geographers, the GSC committee discusses a wide gamut of issues. These are some of the topics we've highlighted in our meetings. Most recently, we discussed COVID-19 and the geography of vulnerability at our fall meeting. You can find the presentations and recordings from the meeting on the committee's website. Today, our topic is disaster response during a pandemic. Our program today will consist of three sessions. The first is our panel of decision makers who I will introduce in a moment. The committee has prepared a few questions for them, which they will discuss and then we'll take questions from the audience. Please feel free to enter your questions into the Q&A box at any time. Then we'll take a short break and return to hear from two researchers who work at the intersection of disaster response and geography. Then in our third session, we'll have time for Q&A with all panelists from both sessions. Please note that this webinar is being recorded and understand that any questions you submit may be read aloud and included in our recording. A link to the recording as well as a copy of the slides will be posted on our website within the week. So let me now introduce our first panel. Carol Morley has served as the district director for Public Health, Idaho North Central District for 28 years. Morley reports to the Policy Making Board of Health, comprised of county commissioners. She's active locally as well as nationally in public health. She serves on the board of the National Association of Counties where she represents local public health and holds leadership positions on the Public Health and Healthy Counties Subcommittee and the Resilient Counties Subcommittee. She has been active in the National Association of County and City Health officials. She served as the president of Nacho 2010 to 2011. She's passionate about public health and shares her passion with numerous public, private and non-profit organizations. Heather Reuter is the assistant commissioner of risk reduction and recovery at the New York City Emergency Management. Since joining in 2007, Reuter has led the development and execution of various plans and tools related to emergency management, evacuation and risk reduction. This ongoing effort has given her technical expertise in assessing New York City's risks from hazards and leading the city's coordination for over $250 million in FEMA hazard mitigation grants. The initiatives include the interim flood protection measures program to deploy temporary flood protection at more than 55 sites and launching the country's first web-based hazard mitigation plan for a local jurisdiction in 2019. She served as the EOC manager for New York City's COVID-19 response and oversaw the New York City Emergency Management COVID-19 hotel program that managed 35,000 reservations to support isolation and quarantine of individuals at risk of exposure. Steve Steinberg is the geographic information officer for Los Angeles County, California. In collaboration with a team of highly skilled GIS professionals, he guides the geospatial strategy for more than 10 million residents and 100,000 county employees across 35 departments. Dr. Steinberg is a self-titled geospatial evangelist. He is passionate about the use of technology to solve real problems of people in their environment. Prior to joining LA County, he served as principal scientist and department head for information management and analysis at the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project Authority, and as a professor of geospatial science at Humboldt State University, California. He continues teaching as an adjunct professor in the graduate programs at UC Irvine and CSU Long Beach, and is actively involved in geospatial professional organizations, currently serving as a member of the board of directors for Uresa International and the California Geographical Information Association. Chris Vaughn serves as the geospatial information officer for FEMA. In this role, he's led organizational change, established an integrated geospatial workforce across the agency, and is advancing innovative technologies within the emergency management community. Vaughn also serves as the chief of the response geospatial office within the planning and exercise division. The RGO delivers policy guidance and training for the FEMA geospatial enterprise. He's a member of the National Response Coordination staff, where he serves as a situational awareness section chief. Since joining FEMA in 2010, Vaughn has provided crisis decision support for more than 250 incidents, including earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, and pandemics. In 2019, he was appointed as co-lead for the Data and Analytics Task Force. In this role, he supported the delivery of advanced modeling technology and analysis related to pandemic response operations. Today, we're focusing on the problems of responding to disasters during the pandemic. It's a big topic, so we've suggested a few specific aspects for our panelists to address. Geospatial and other technologies, common spaces and infrastructure, responder preparedness, and other resources. But they may bring in any issues that they think are relevant. Okay, if everybody's ready to go, I'm going to start with the questions now. And I'm going to start with the first question, and I'm going to ask Heather to respond to this, and then I'd like the other panelists to just chime in when they're ready to. First question. What was needed for disaster preparedness last year that was different from previous years because of the pandemic? Yeah, hi, thank you. And I apologize, my video won't turn it on, so my voice will do here. Hi everyone. So, what do we need for disaster preparedness last year, those different, I mean, a multitude of things from last year certainly challenged us. Here in New York City, especially being kind of the ambassador of wave one. In emergency management for those on the phone that don't need to know this, we tend to work in what's called an emergency operations center setting, which means we all work in one room. So kind of the main hub for New York City is we have representatives from everyone in one place. And that's how emergency management works and kind of how our structure is designed. So we need to very quickly go virtual and manage an incident in a virtual setting was just very new for us. So, clearly having to, we, I think we're able to successfully do it and we've had times where we've done it in pieces but cutting the entire city into this structure and having just a completely different way that you really manage an incident instead of walking over and talking to someone having to set of calls and chats and making sure that he was working. So I know everyone's gone through this but where the information changes so quickly. That was certainly quite a lot of, you know, a big adjustment for us and not to bring that we do in practice. You know, before COVID, but we've learned quite a lot to and think also the data management piece of the geographic extent of COVID. In our preparedness efforts, we try to really understand the risk of different hazards pre incident. So where, you know, where the building types or the neighborhoods or communities or the infrastructure assets that are more at risk from different hazards. A lot of that is our preparedness efforts and we try to plan for that in advance and strategically think through where the response need might be. But, but COVID it was city wide. So, you know, with 305 square miles of city here and five, five counties within our city and really the hotspots of where the needs were and where we're seeing the rise of, you know, whether it was cases or hospital surge. We had to be very nimble and being able to deal with the city wide response. And that's not something that we had always planned for. We always thought we would have more isolated impact and had a sense of where the geography would be. But, you know, every, you know, every kind of few days to weeks to months, it seemed that we had to be shipped where the operations need to center around based on where the surge of need and demand were. So those were all kind of things that I think will take into our preparedness efforts more in New York City. Great. Thank you. This is Carol. I'll lead off on that. Thank you Heather for team team that up. So I'm in the north central little skinny part of Idaho snugged right between the state of Washington and Montana. I'm in a five county health district public health district. We cover 13,500 square miles with only a population of about 120,000. So our total diabolic opposite of New York City, and the structure and the population and the geographical outlay of being in a in a rural setting like we are. We are also in my five counties are in two time zone. We are divided by mountain ranges and rivers and so finding people sometimes it was more of an issue than having too many resources lack of resources going forward. And also last year. That was totally different is, we had major fires that were going on in the Northwest in our state of Idaho, and the state of Washington, Montana, all of that. So not only were we gearing up and dealing with a pandemic and illness related to pandemic but we are also dealing with the fires and the smoke. The changes that needed to happen in partners as well as the way we have typically addressed or responded to disasters in the past. We, we know how to work with our tribes it's also in our five counties. We work really closely with our national forest, we do smoke control we do education training. Smoke is something that we do all of the time, but we weren't really geared up and ready to deal with the firefighters with their smoke issues and having coven at the same time. So, it was a new adventure for us in managing how coven collided with the fires and the smoke issues in our five counties, and having enough response ability, ability to respond to doing both of those issues. We've always worked with our, our smoke jumpers always, you know, help them with their kitchens and their camps and in their health issues. But this was different when we needed to evacuate a whole group of smoke jumpers because of a covert exposure. And where the nearest hotel was to put them up for their, you know, 10 to 14 day isolation period, taking them out of the smoke. The fire response also was a major change for us in what we've done differently last year versus other responses we've done in the in the past. Well, I'll jump in next and sort of fall between Heather and Carol. So LA County is probably many of you know the largest by population in the country, larger than 40 or so states. Only 4000 square miles so not quite as dispersed as Carol's and not quite as dense as New York City although the populations in the same ballpark. So I think we had a few items I'll piggyback on. Heather talked about the EOC and how do you deal with bringing people together in an emergency context with a pandemic going on. One of the things we struggled with early on as a county is our EOC didn't have a clue what to do with the pandemic so they had everyone come to the EOC and they were sitting next to each other and they were, you know, they were calling in emergency. You know, disaster response workers under that protocol, just as though it was a fire or a flood or an earthquake. And what that led to was some interesting problems around you know how do we socially distance how do we get enough PPE into the EOC so people can still work effectively. I will say admittedly for the folks in the geospatial side of the house. We were called in the same way as everybody else, but we had, I will say, lively debates around whether or not that was even necessary because I kept suggesting to our EOC folks, the geospatial folks can work just as effectively from home or from wherever remotely and collaborate and share data and produce all the same mapping and information and so on that they would do if they all come to a physical room that was about maybe 15 by 15 and had five people crammed in it. You know, side by side. So I think for us it was learning how do we adjust to away from business as usual to something different because this isn't a typical emergency situation. And, you know, eventually it got sorted out. They started letting people work remotely. But even in the context of the EOC working traditionally, the pandemic is such a big issue to deal with. We weren't just dealing with GIS people and and and so on at the EOC we still had to collaborate across our county departments. You know, our health people are planning people and so on. So we were already working in an online, you know, AGL type environment anyway. And I think what happened over time is we proved to the EOC that that could work and eventually they released at least the geospatial folks from the EOC back to their homes. Granted it took six months into the pandemic till that happened. It was a challenge to convince people this could work. And some of the things Heather alluded to communications was one of the big concerns. You know, we kept hearing well no we have to be able to walk into the GIS room and talk to the people about the mapping or about the analysis they're doing. We, we, we went to the point of setting up 24 hour WebEx meetings that were just always open so they could walk into the room and talk to the person through the computer, instead of walking into the room and talk to the person physically. And after they got used to the idea that, you know, modern telecommunications zoom meetings work, things got a lot better. And, and I think, you know, that played out really importantly, a bit later into the pandemic, like Carol mentioned, we have fires in LA County. We had fires break out last summer and I suspect, you know, we will again. So dealing with that new emergency in the middle of the pandemic, we were much more prepared. We had built out through the early phases of the pandemic, you know, the web tools, the dashboards, the web mapping applications and so on. So they could be spun up and comfortable for the other emergency managers to work with. So I think that was a big thing. One other thing I want to touch on, which I think Carol alluded to a little bit with the firefighters were much more densely populated so when we have fires we have to evacuate neighborhoods we have lots of people that are in a fire zone and need to move out of their homes and for us that was another challenge how do we think about evacuation zones and planning and where to put whole communities you can't just send everybody to the local school gym in the middle of a pandemic that created all kinds of challenges as well. So thinking about how we shift evacuation planning in the middle of a pandemic because there's a fire or some other emergency also was something we had to had to pivot to very quickly because that hadn't been thought of before. And I'll leave it there. Thank you. I'll round it out I guess so yeah I was listening to the other panelists and it's bringing it's turning up a lot of memories for me and all I can think about is the good bad and the ugly. I'm right there with Steve. We activated everybody brought everybody in, you know, right in the middle of pandemic, everybody come on in and and it was that was that was not the right thing to do, and I think it took us, you know, probably two to three four to kind of figure out this thing called teams or zoom or whatever platform we were on we were on all of them. And it eventually like everybody else on the call we eventually got through that and figure that out and there was a lot of trust. Really, I think is the word I'm looking for that you know I can trust you to do your job and you're going to be able to do that. I think the benefit of that trust factor. It really brought in a bit of equality, because we we at the emergency management level we operate at a very inverted pyramid level ICS is an inverted pyramid where all things start at the authority having jurisdiction at the, at the local level. And so on a common platform that that being in our in our homes in our, you know, our spare bedrooms. It brought a level of equality that we kind of broke apart from that local county state fed arbitrary siloed perspective, and it got us all talking to each other just like this, and it kind of broke apart those those artificial barriers that have been up for for decades. And that's some of the good that came out of it going back a little bit to the bad and the ugly is, you know, we haven't had a pandemic since 1917 18, and so nobody knew what to do nobody knew how to move data, I mean we've already really had, you know, Zika and you know those kinds of things but nowhere near this scale so my scale was all 50 states and all of our territories, you know, in fact we were dealing with the international community where we were getting and receiving products and services from the world so it was a worldwide thing we had to mic up all 50 states. Don's on so pick on Esri in a good way I mean we used our just online. We had weekly calls and it felt like we were advancing as a community every week by six months every week we moved the needle six months forward. And actually we got to the point where the bad and ugly again as we were really struggling with getting data about the pandemic and there was an unprecedented demand signal to know impacts at the individual hospital level every day. And, you know, trying to tell some you know I can barely tell you where the hospital is geographically let alone bed counts and hospital sheets and what kind of, you know, sailing solution they're using today I'm talking too much I want to get off my soapbox but we finally got through that but it was painful it we literally devolved into an Excel spreadsheet, pandemonium, that's how information moved was through Excel spreadsheets. I'm looking forward to, you know, all the after actions coming out of this because it's going to make us better prepared for the healthcare system in the sector of how information is going to flow for the next one. Thank you all for those comments. Now we're going to open it up to questions from the panelists and discussion from the from the geographical sciences committee and discussion among the panelists. I'll start it off. There's two interesting themes that I heard most of you highlight and that is information technology but the other one was human communication and the challenges you had in human communication. But also the learning from human communication, and I guess the question might be. Do we have a new procedure now do we have a new standard or new ways or do we need more tools to improve that interpersonal communication and the flow of information. I'll try and take a stab at that. I would say, partially, we do, as I alluded to, it took us some time to pivot to using these online tools. You know, I think like Chris said, during the early days, I literally had, you know, WebEx, go to meeting zoom teams, my cell phone text messages slack, you know, literally I had, I had, I have, I had six screens in front of me to cell phones and every application that I had in time, because different departments or organizations or entities we collaborate with, all had a preferred platform, and there was no coordination between those which made it chaotic at best. But I think, as we've matured in this process, you know, like many, we've settled on some standard technologies that we're using, and that's really helped. You know, because now everyone's on the same platform, at least within the county family, all our departments and our EOC. But that was that was a struggle because nobody knew what what the best way to communicate was. And it took us some time, I think, where I say we're only partially there is because we're still in emergency mode we haven't the, you know, we haven't demobilized yet so we haven't done the hot wash to really understand the pros and cons of all the things we've done around the fly. And I think that will come and hopefully we'll have a time to compare notes with other organizations and agencies to get some of these best practices worked out and documented. And I think that's really the next step we need. Thank you. You know, it's nothing like an emergency to really kind of trial run and test run everything and have and reduce all those barriers so you know things I think would have taken years to get to we got to really no choice to do it in days or weeks and figure out all the possibilities. I think we in New York and finally, you know, better and better and recognizing the things that the best practices. We've done a couple mini hot washes. A lot of it going to what some of the other speakers discussed with these combined events or when you have the pandemic and for us a heat wave, or coastal storm or winter weather and so how do we, you know, manage multiple disasters and do it remotely. I think, you know, some of the best practices, I think the more remote capabilities you have that's actually become a lot of efficiencies and certain things too. For those that don't work in emergency management situation reports are the big thing you cut out at the end of your operational period and that's your kind of narrative. That's your report that goes up to your leadership about everything happening in the different sectors. And what I feel like we spent kind of years fine tuning and word. Now we have these really amazing dashboards that are automated real time and everyone can go and collaborate real time and make the edits. So, I think there's just been so much information and so much use cases that come out of this year, but I think we're going to have so much work from the improvement of how you visualize and say what's going on people consumption of information is so different. You know, it's just that's happening in the world now. So, reading a tweet is more interesting than a book and so in emergency management, we have to think about how to tell this story what's happening in the disaster. In a short form and how people want to digest it and a lot more visual to it. Word documents that we're using. Thanks Heather. I want to remind the attendees that you can put questions into the Q&A box. Carol. I already had a situation where you kind of dispersed in remote. Does that mean that your, your group was better equipped to deal with this new way of communicating than perhaps the cities. I think we had equal or more challenges, at least equal challenges like everyone did. Actually, because we are so remote and our infrastructure is, is quite weak when it comes to bandwidth and cell phone service and a lot of that the technology that is afforded by some others that are, you know, more, you know, bigger area. We communication was still an issue. We still had many staff working in a building in their offices because there is no connectivity from their homes. And no connectivity, no cell service from our, our rural office we have five rural county offices. And during all of this, when everyone was using a lot of bandwidth, because of calls and zooms and everything, we were not able to actually do a lot of the remote telecommuting because of some of those deficiencies that we have in our infrastructure. We're working on that. And so that is improving. And so if anything is coming out of this, it's really brought to fact that we need, we need to gear up for this much better, even if it's costing a lot of money for us to actually get connectivity out in our little areas. So the human nature of communication, like you talked about Pat, the other part that we were seeing because we're our, you know, boots on the ground and we had to deal and still are daily, I mean, setting up call centers even setting up that, you know, online presence. So people couldn't watch a map could watch dashboards could watch those things that public health was doing our state started with this because they have that capacity they have the geospatial people in house, local public health and Idaho doesn't, but it soon became so obvious to our governor and others that because of our geography in Idaho, and our politics. We really had different catchment areas there's seven public health districts in Idaho, they had different areas that needed their own dashboards we needed our own S remaps we needed our own, you know, data to show our own people, they weren't trusting it from the state they wanted it from the local. So quickly again we didn't, we had to gear up but like others have said, you go from a brain idea to implementation for 14 days. It's like, oh my goodness I never thought my crew could have could do that. But what an amazing abilities when you're challenged like that, but dealing with the public and the communication issues with the public was a real struggle and is better. It was a communication, but the tone of the communication. I ultimately had to start bringing staff in that we're doing hotline answering our call center for counseling. Because of the abuse they were getting on the phone line and needing to do some of that in person, even though we were, you know, in at least in the same building together in the same space. That was a different part of the human communication that I had not expected at all. We could, we could talk to each other remotely on staff because that trust is there, our partners we've worked with a lot of a lot of the time, but the public communication was really in lots of, lots of times detrimental to the mental health of our employees. So we have to continue to keep that in mind as we look at ways that we communicate. And most of the public, a lot of the public still wanting it on a phone call they don't want to chat with you on an email they want to chew you out with the phone on there here. Oh, very moving. Thank you for that. Um, Janelle has a question. Janelle. Knox Hayes, would you like to unmute. Yeah, thank you. Thank you to the panelists are really lively discussion really interesting to understand what's happened in the last year and how it's changing your emergency response and I have two questions associated to that one is about the unique compounded risks that we've been experiencing this semester and this past year. Does that change the way that you think about emergency response and how your divisions are organized I think, Heather you kind of address this a bit by saying everybody had to physically be in the same room because the issues are so intertwined and associated. But how do we, how do we plan and think about these kinds of events happening more frequently in the future and then associated with that as to what extent I've been doing some work analyzing compounded risks and coven in New York City and was talking with an official who said you know there's a high expectation that individuals do a lot of the planning in advance of emergency events so they know they have friends and family on high ground or they know where they're supposed to go. And to what extent is that the expectation and is there any capacity and thinking about the way our technologies are changing to design solutions that better prepare individuals in these kinds of emergency events to be able to assess their options and to respond in real time if they don't necessarily know where they're supposed to go and what they're supposed to do. I can take a quick stab at that first I think the two things I really want to stress is is there's actually a lot of if it's the wrong thing to say if there's a silver lining to all of this is it really did force the conversation at least in emergency management I've been doing this since Katrina, we've been flying planes since Katrina. In fact, during Katrina we had so many planes flying and was flew into each other and they're all trying to take a picture of the damage. So there's a large industry both satellite aerial us ground based photos photos that are taken following the disaster, but it wasn't until coven. That people weren't able to go out physically into the field to collect damage assessments, and it fundamentally changed the conversation, at least within FEMA. We've been screaming to the rooftops look you can use a satellite image you can use a plane you can use a us, you don't have to go out into the field. It was really falling on deaf ears because we like going out into the field, we like knocking on doors and we like that engagement we sent 17,000 housing inspectors to Hurricane Harvey. We did. Meanwhile, we flew the entire thing 20 times, you know I've got pictures but I also have 17,000 house inspectors on the ground. It really wasn't until coven. And so to your question directly for last year, we have the most active Atlanta hurricane season on record. The entire western half of the United States burn up in flames. I mean it was a terrible fire season last year. You know, we had tornadoes and floods and on top of all that a pandemic but what we did have is we had more virtual damage assessments remote damage assessments and I've ever seen in my career. I've seen it for 11 years. So there's really been this this huge shift for the use of geospatial technologies to more things and I get off the so box. You know going back to that communication strategy right it brought everybody on an equal planning field I could do a zoom call with my state local county tribal counterpart, I can bring up that image we could debate that damage assessment in real time, virtually, and we're all on equal playing ground, right, which is a that's never happened before. And then I think the third thing, especially as it relates to data information management GIS really, really knocked it out of the park, I think, when all other systems struggled and once again we really did approach the beginning parts of this pandemic from an Excel spreadsheet that's how we were reporting everything was through Excel spreadsheet. We eventually got to the point where GIS became a system of record, where that was the only way to really manage information was through GIS. And then we broke it out that it didn't have to go into a map, but it started to go into other dashboards whether it's Tableau power bi. It didn't have to go into a map. I think that's when things really started to turn for us is that it was a system of record you can and still meet those coven, you know, stay away restrictions. I want to piggyback on everything Chris just said because I think we, we experienced the same thing. You know, as I said, we had fires in the middle of the pandemic here in LA County. We've always flown damage assessment imagery after fires, but put people out on the ground very frequently and that was last last fall or Bobcat fire was the first time I think we really took an image first approach to damage assessment. And, and, you know, and if people had to go into the field it was much more limited we weren't putting as many people out on the ground. And I think it's taught us an interesting lesson in general which is, you know, maybe we don't need to put so many people out on the ground anyway, even if there's not a pandemic so, you know, there's as you said the silver lining to the pandemic as we were forced to learn new ways of doing our workflows that we hadn't done before. I think you know one of the things we learned to and it's actually become a statewide initiative in California with our state GIO is we had no clue what to define as evacuation zones, when we have events. So it turned us to this idea of, you know, instead of waiting for a lot of data coming in from the field during a fire as the perimeter is changing or whatever it may be. It would be good to actually pre plan evacuation zones to understand them in context not just of the risk of the event but also just the traffic flow, the, you know, the congestion issues and other things I mean, as I understand it a lot of hurricane zones they have evacuation routes they do that, you know or tsunami evacuation zones they kind of a predefined routes and how you evacuate people in sequence but we don't do that as well on fires because we don't know where and when they're going to happen. So we're working statewide all the counties with our state GIO to develop a statewide sort of evacuation zone map that can essentially say instead of drawing them on the fly when the event happens, we're just going to say, there's an event here, click, you know, toggle this one to evacuate and knowing that that'll be an orderly process. That's going to take us a little time but we've already had several meetings and that's going to continue. And I think again it's that idea that there's a lot of things we can pre plan for, but you know the traditional emergency response model is often you only do the work during the emergency because that's when the funding and the resources are available. And then as soon as the emergency ends there's no resources to do anything and everyone goes back to their regular work. So I think we're trying to really look at that a little bit differently and look at ways we can leverage the lessons learned and other sorts of resources so we can do some planning between emergencies. Great, really, really interesting comments I have a couple of questions set up but I just like to briefly call on Carol and get the rural perspective from her on two of the big issues you have both raised which is the role of GIS is kind of the central data collection, did that work in her area, and also the use of imagery. Carol. Yeah, for the fire part of last year, GIS was a critical component and I could be on calls with our national forest and we did daily briefings and we could all see the same maps and the same images and the fire that spreading as it was turning its way through parts of our counties. So absolutely was was a huge value. Now, not managed from my facility being a small local health department, managed from, you know, the Forest Service which had that that capacity when for the local public health as far as the pandemic response, what we're using most of our GIS mapping now is to help people locate clinics where where the vaccine is how close it is to where they might live. Those sorts of uses for the mapping tools that are out there and it's been very very beneficial. And we have some of that capacity in house, which is great in a limited amount to do our own mappings, and then combining that with the states abilities and the state larger capacity that that's how we've managed a lot of that GIS work at the local level. Yeah, that's great that makes sense. Okay, I'm going to call on Don right, who has a question Don, would you like to unmute. Thank you very much and I very much appreciate the insights and the and the frankness of the panel. I wanted to touch on a point that that Carol raised in terms of infrastructure. As we know Congress seems to be going around and around on how to define infrastructure and maybe that's a false struggle because of the politics involved there but I wondered, especially given that we are in fact in this near constant state of disaster response. How would the panel define the most important piece of infrastructure for you. Well, go ahead. I was just gonna say that one word data. And we've been talking as a county about that for several many years that data is infrastructure, just like the National Highway system enables commerce data in enables analysis and understanding. So I think that's our key thing that we've, you know, I keep pushing in our counties, we need that data infrastructure to support all of this stuff disasters or otherwise. And I think the secondary one which is also part of what Congress is debating is the broadband stuff. There's still probably more for us in the urbanized areas there's still an assumption everyone has the internet and you just put something up on the internet and they'll know what to do, they can get a vaccine they know to evacuate whatever. We have a massive digital divide problem in LA County. We have, you know, hundreds of thousands of households with no internet and you know, million, you know, well over a million people. And there are some, you know, and it's, it's nothing surprising to those who look at this data but the assumption that you can just post it and everyone will get it or you can hit a cell phone, you know an emergency signal on the cell phones and everyone will get it is is farcical at best. So, you know, I think we need to really address that broadband issue. And I know Carol's got this in the rural context even worse probably one thing people forget about LA County is we have a large rural component in LA County, everyone it's not just Hollywood. You know, so we we face those same struggles as well. I would agree with Steve. It's not just the data collection, but it's the data analysis, and then the data visualization as well so that whole data concept is a big bucket, not just the collection of the data, got to know how to do it and then how to report it back to the public to it's understandable. But the broadband connectivity is a big issue all over the country we know and a lot of people looking at this but it's definitely become a highlighted issue for us here in Idaho, just another side story. We had gone to us web based click here sign up for an appointment we know you're there will you know, and, first of all, not everyone having, you know, email, not everyone having a web address at home that they can go to, and then a huge, huge divide in our citizen population, which went first in a lot of our states for the vaccine, but could not or would not navigate online appointment scheduling. So needing for us to set up back again that old world phone lines just for seniors to call and talk to a person to schedule appointment so not that that's that's part of the infrastructure side note there but I just thought I would share that. And even though we have the, the broadband sometimes we still have to work with the populations that don't get it. Now, you know, just in a little different lens I guess I always just traditionally my role and I do a lot of post sandy work and flood work, you know infrastructure has been much more about the physical needs. And COVID has really and a lot of emergency management does have a lot of the physical infrastructure impacts and COVID spend this pretty invisible disaster in a lot of ways and so we know it's there and it's the social infrastructure that I think has really become much more prominent in our conversations. So going into just right now, the vaccine process. It's how do you how do you notify in our world, you know, the elderly disabled person who speaks non English speaking on a high rise building. Where they can go when they're the resources available. And a lot of it is relying on that social network and that social position. So, there's quite a lot of work on aren't how to really strengthen the social networks to also have that some things that's always been there but I think COVID started out really nicely. I'm going to take it from the, if I may, sorry, Pat. Yeah, from the complete opposite angle of all this is. So I live in northern Virginia where 70% of the world's internet traffic runs in my backyard, literally. During the height of the onset of the pandemic, every single big name company approached us. And they all dangle the magic black box carrot of AI. Hey, if you give me your information. I will make match I'll answer all of your questions will, you know, we'll rub the lamp the gene will pop out and you won't don't worry about it we can answer all of your questions and so we threw some of these some sets to the biggest names of the biggest companies out there using the best infrastructure that's out there. And arguably, maybe to Steve's point it is all about the data, you know, this this incident, at least for us, mainly focused on the supply chain. We're talking about pushing gloves and mask and PPE, or ventilators or the or the drugs that go to the ventilators. And you know that that supply chain network is just in time ordering its handshake relationships between the truck drivers and the suppliers and, and that whole system ended up being broken right I mean there was you know we started running out of supplies, and trying to find all of those various nodes, even though everybody was on the cloud. There's like five different major clouds, and those clouds don't talk to each other intentionally. So, you know, you know, the opposite end of this is just as true as much as you know we struggle with people not having the internet. We have the best internet in the world, but yet we still can't find information or access the data that we're looking for on the world's biggest clouds. That's my point. Thanks. Thank you all for those for those responses I think we're bleeding over into question to which is what would you do differently next time or what do you hope to do differently next time. So we're just going to keep going in this free form format. And I have a question from from the audience. Are there aspects of your work which in retrospect, this goes back to the human resources and how your, your organization works. Are there aspects of your work which in retrospect worked better under the remote working paradigm. If so, are you likely to reorganize your operations to carry on this way. I'll just throw that open to the panelists. I think 100%, you know, learning this remote aspect and how efficient and we can be in it. I don't see us being able to ever go back to what it was before. You know, one thing that was really, you know, beneficial with our winter storm. We had a big blizzard this year at the end of January. And normally when there's a winter storm where bringing everyone into you see oftentimes that like to be in the middle of the night, you know, 2am 3am well how to take the subways traverse during these blizzard conditions that's just operationally how it works or you're sheltering somewhere on the top in the building. And we got to do it all virtually and, you know, running that from my living room with a file. This is kind of great. You know, and not having people having to go outside in auspicious conditions to work these events we don't have to I mean I think there's a lot there. Obviously, and again obviously the just the being able to do everything digitally and work in these collaborative online how based systems and having a lot more kind of real time information come in I think even just how we do reporting. It's just, you know, need some balance in a different place than we were being an hour ago. So everything Heather just said, you know, the, the taking people out of the commuting to an EOC. And not only is it just safer, it's also a huge time savings I mean, you know you can wake up and be at work in 30 seconds versus, you know, for us and probably, you know, and some other places around the country, you know, for me it can be an hour or two to get to our EOC from where I live, depending on traffic, maybe with COVID it would be less. That's all lost time that suddenly became productive so people working these long days anyway during an emergency. At least they could work more fresh and more relaxed because they were at home they could go take a nap in their own bed not on a cot in a you know see somewhere. So I think those are huge things that that we learned and whether we'll actually go back to the old ways after things get better or not I think remains to be seen. And as I alluded to earlier, there's sort of the traditional we always have done it that way mentality in certain parts of the hierarchy for emergency management that still want to see people in the room, you know, or think they do. One thing we learned for sure was that the geospatial folks working on the emergency, we were the most rapidly up and running effectively remotely across the board, you know, of anyone in any part of the process. And I think that really showed the power of a well oil team working in the cloud environment that the reason that happened is because we'd already been doing it right. You know, GIS people have been working in the cloud and in a GL and other other platforms for years so it wasn't new for our GIS people. It was new for everybody else. And that's since I think we kind of set the standard for what's possible going forward and hopefully that'll stick. Great. Thank you. Carol I'm going to call on you again because you do have a different perspective on this, and particularly from the from the public health viewpoint, maybe the remote working wasn't as easy for you as it was for the GIS people. Our, our IT GIS, I don't have a GIS person I have one IT staff in my five counties did work from home was had the luxury of doing that. And I have to tell you, 96% of my employees worked every day from the office. Dealing with the pandemic like it was dealing with the public, some of the call center happened off site, but many of them like I said we brought back together on occasion just to do crisis counseling. But a lot of my staff that were integral to contact tracing, the data entry and the mechanism to make sure that we were getting the feed from all of our hospitals and our reporting labs. So those let positive test results come to public health, we have to do contact tracing, we are still on a fax machine reporting system for our hospitals and labs to public health. So having a group of staff dealing with paper faxes coming in still during this pandemic had to be on site. And then not only did that change and then quickly by December. The vaccine is arriving and we the vaccine lands at us we're the only ones with the ultra cold freezers in our five counties. So I have had my immunization my vaccine staff my epi staff. They have worked on site this whole 425 days that we've been involved in this. Unlike, unlike lots that have been able to do remote. We have not found a lot of the technology or the infrastructure that is has been needed to keep people at home. So again, you know writing different policies and procedures to keep employees faith and healthy. Everyone in their own space wearing masks hand sanitizer all of that. And I have to tell you we did not have one case of COVID amongst my staff that worked the last 400 days. So good for them for the for you know being so careful. But once vaccine started and now we're vaccinators as well. The main the big vaccine clinics are run by my lots of mice, nurses and employees. We are been hands on during this whole time. Wow. And thank you for all the work that your staff has done and that is a great record of avoiding, avoiding infection. Very impressive. This transition us now to the last of our third questions, which is, what, what do we need research on now what, what are the gaps what are the most important gaps to be filled what are the things we don't understand. What questions about preparedness during the pandemic. Would you like disaster preparedness resilient researchers to focus on. Ready to kind of Heather. Yeah. For us here are for me something I thought about is just risk communication and risk awareness. I think about, we talked a little bit about coastal storm planning and evacuations and such. So in New York, and I used to do a lot of hurricane planning here. There was behavioral studies and so when we did our behavioral studies for evacuation compliance, it was right after treatment. And so there was a large compliance rate. So we plan for all these high numbers and I think there's a large awareness that urban areas have a hurricane. I don't think that was actually a very well understood thing and Katrina brought that to light. And then, you know, not long after the fast forward 10 years, we have Irene and Sandy, and we have these two hurricanes about us and our compliance evacuation compliance and shelter demand for lower. And I think it's just, you know, a factor of people perceive their risk differently based on what's recent what's in recent memory and so COVID will be a really interesting one and I think understanding people's perceived risk and then also how we think that changes over time. And people I think are going to be very compliant and aware today, but what do you think that might look like in one year and five years and 10 years from now. I mean, hopefully we don't have a pandemic for a long time. That risk will continue and people's awareness change the further out we go. I'll take you back on Heather's comments because my main reaction to this question I have to. But my first one was, we need to understand the social and socio economic sort of components of of pandemics or disasters in general, because different people do react differently. Different people have different ability to communicate receive information asked for help. So, and I mean, for us in LA County, I'm sure it's similar in New York City. We have over 200 spoken languages in the county. We do official business for many county things in 12 of those, which covers the vast majority but still that, you know, and I will pick on Ezra a little bit some of the tools that you use Google translate, but some of them don't. And it only translates pieces of the stuff on the website so building out, and we had to do this we were we were building out a dashboard to help people find free public Wi-Fi for to address the digital divide we had all these kids. They couldn't turn in their homework they couldn't get schoolwork done people can log in to find out how to get a vaccine if they didn't have internet home so we were putting out a website or boards direction to publish all the free Wi-Fi around the county and people could search for nearby. That was easy to do in English. And then we got asked to do it in Spanish, and that was a nightmare. Now, to Ezra's credit they helped us very much in working through the solutions and we got through the development of that second language and then we stopped because doing 10 more was going to be a nightmare. I think we do need ways to work on cross cultural communication, whether it's in the website or otherwise, and and communicating across different demographics different languages, different abilities, you know different age groups, all these things. Because there's a lot of differences in social norms and perception and understanding so, and that leads to my second thought, which is, which could help this is modeling. I think we really need to develop those kind of we were good at modeling the natural events to a degree I mean we have fire models we have flood models we have all those kinds of models, but I don't think we have a good legitimate understanding of how the social component interacts with those. How will people actually react when the fire model says they should evacuate. And how do we improve that and plan for that in advance more effectively so I think holistically I'd say modeling, and not just the physical processes but looking beyond the social economic cultural, and, and, you know, communication modes is another big part of that I'll go next and let Chris take up the lead for this one, or the tail for this one. So, I wasn't going to mention politics but I'm going to because the pandemic ended up and still is very political, lots of politics have gone on during this pandemic. And I do wonder if there's a way to capture if, if we wouldn't, if it weren't so politicized, how the uptake a vaccine would really be, instead of what maybe with the challenges we're having now with uptake a vaccine. If it were enough on politics, but the other part back to Steve's issue. I think all the pandemic has shown us the inequity that we also have in reaching a lot of our population. So there are different languages, ethnicities, but the, the inequities just in socio and economic, this pandemic has really brought to light. And I think that that would be something else for us to to maybe do more research on the other part is the wear and tear or the emotional the mental health aspect of this pandemic, not just on the public health workers. But this has been a huge, huge crisis in our public health workforce if you look at some of the initial data out there just that says how many local health officers have been asked to leave their jobs during the pandemic because of mask orders that were put in place in the rural communities. How many were forced out because of politics. I think that the, the unintended consequences, some of this ugly stuff, Chris, that we would prefer to focus on the good and the, and the happy but some of the, the trauma that has been inflicted on the workforce, dealing with this, but also our public having to cope and understand and try to filter all of this. The nastiness that kind of came out of in some people around the pandemic being so polarized and politicized. Yeah, I'll try to round it out but you know I want to want to pull on the string of what I heard from from from all three of the other panelists, especially Carol. We're where they're they're faxing information in. Now just pause and think about that for just a second. That that is reality. That's how our county and local emergency managers pass information, even not in a pandemic and so FEMA FEMA following Hurricane Irma and Maria. And one only has to think, you know, not too long and think about Puerto Rico and the lack of power and the lack of communication and the inability to move information off the island. So FEMA came out with this concept called community lifelines. And so from a study perspective, I would, I would challenge you if you're looking for things to study, especially from a preparedness and a risk perspective what are those those things that somebody in a Washington DC office 3000 miles away. I could tell you that that is a mind boggling statement that we have hospital systems faxing information in every day that is not what they were thinking up here in Washington DC that that somebody is on the ground trying to fax information and they were asking if I was there. They were expecting information daily and that it's all going to be digital and you heard Steve say, we don't have internet. We don't have, we don't have computers, and you're moving information to make multi billion devices to save hundreds of thousands of lives. That's what I would encourage you to focus on is what are those major major risks based on these community lifelines that if we don't fix broadband if we don't fix this digital divide, you're going to face this financial pipeline or if it's a fire or whatever it is we've got to fix these things because not everybody's equal in this great thing we call internet equality. That's really interesting Chris, could you elaborate a little bit more on the community lifelines program is the idea to map out in advance how different kind of communities communicate with each other or what's the what's the purpose of that. Sure, it really it's on FEMA.gov. I would encourage everybody to go to FEMA.gov and look up community lifelines. There are seven lifelines that came out of the Harvey Irma and Maria season health and safety hazardous material power communication transportation. Food, water and sheltering I think that's I think that's either six and may have missed one in there but the hazardous materials and seven. But they tried to bin major major themes you could think of it UNESCO has a similar kind of construct the UN has five themes these are our seven themes. We need them of as Maslow's hierarchy of need, you know, you need food, water and shelter to get through the day you need a car to be able to transport you from your house to the hospital you need that hospital operating and in order to do so that hospital needs a fax machine at power, you know, and supplies to be able to get, you know, to be able to respond so they're seven general themes, and then their sub components under all of that and it's a very very fragile system I can speak from the GIS perspective. Almost none of the major seven components and especially the sub components if you talk about power, power is broken into energy and fuel. The sub components of gas stations is that gas station open or closed. Well right now we use gas buddy. We use others as well but there's almost very limited real time, nationwide data sets for the seven lifelines and kind of goes back to my struggle with the supply chain. We don't think till it's too late and we're in the thick of it. What do you mean, the local county doesn't have internet or they're passing information over a fax machine. Especially in Washington we don't think that way we just assume that they already have the internet or they have a smartphone, or they can communicate effectively and they know what to do so I think that's part of it and you can take it from a resiliency preparedness standpoint to say, hey the next time you get into this type of incident, you're not going to have the information flow because these things are broken you got to fix these things first. Wow. Thank you for that. I'm happy to take additional questions from the audience we have another 30 minutes or so of discussion time. One question on the, on the Q amp a board from one of our audience members about how to communicate and visualize the data. The dashboards and algorithms resulted from last year's pandemic, as well as the extreme events, using different geospatial and streaming data sets. How useful have these been, or do they create confusion. So focusing on the dashboards and the information communication. Those worked well for everybody, Heather. Yeah, I'll just start I mean, I know I've said this already. You know, we really moved and migrated off of just more from text to data. I'm kind of blown away by what we were able to create. I'm starting to empower point of numbers, much more robust systems, but there's that you know, you know, data, you can tell the story you want to tell. And they've always been manipulated and like now it's really about constantly what are we trying to say and get to and baseline. More data science is going to be needed to be embedded in the emergency management community. I think we've had to really kind of pull from experts in our city family. I'm data analytics. And we, you know, we ourselves now are embedding a more data such a position in our, our e o z structure so clinical planning section and now we actually have some of these real jobs just to think about data. Because there's a lot of ways to present it and really get to what your, you know, what your goal is so this is certainly forced that and I think advances there. In terms of confusion, there's always going to be different information coming out. And, you know, I think it's really about working across your different levels of government and partnerships, but I think, yeah, there's only a confusion to so that's always happening in the background is also trying to have that harmony is the data, the same that your other jurisdictions or levels of government are looking at. And I think sharing that information is pretty much data partnerships as well. Carol, what format have you been using for communicating data outside of your office to to the public or county board members or whoever you need to communicate to and what's what is our dashboards are have been framed around power BI because of the simplicity of use of our staff. So that was part of the reason that platform was was chosen. And they've been huge, hugely accepted in our areas. Some of the fun stuff maybe, you know, we post every day by by three o'clock on our dashboard every day new data it's updated, you know, every day, every day. The media have been some of our most rabid about the data. And as you all can imagine, they love it and then they hate it. And if they love to find a mistake in the data, even a comma or something that maybe isn't quite representative what they thought. So when we first initially in COVID, our state was looking was using a statewide data dashboard for all the counties. And it quickly became, they could not maintain at such so they gave it to us at the local level to implement that's where I said, we went from zero to 14 days with power BI and our dashboards were up so that was was very helpful for us. But the switch from the state collecting the data to the locals reporting the data that the media had a heyday. And anyway, we've figured out how to use them to our best, you know, abilities in reporting that data. But it has been really valuable for, for a lot of our population to have dashboards they can understand them if they can get on them and our media then extrapolates it puts it in print because we still have newspapers. And then it goes out that way to a lot of the public. I'll echo what my colleagues just said I mean I think dashboarding and visualization in general has been tremendously valuable, both for all the reasons that are already been mentioned you know, communicating to the public, the media, all the other players. You know, we all know the saying a picture is worth 1000 words. And the best part of that is, you know, going back to my earlier comment. It doesn't matter what language you speak in many cases, if you can visualize data without language attached to it, you know, and the colors and the symbols and the cartography are good, or the dashboarding, you know, icons and symbols are good. You can cross cut a lot of those language barriers and cultural barriers people understand pictures much more intuitively in many cases doesn't eliminate the problem but it helps. I think the other thing that really we saw. I guess it's a good thing, although we're struggling with it is our decision makers are our county board of supervisors our department executives across the region. They fell in love with dashboards and GIS maps and all this stuff we were producing for the pandemic. You know we put I think about a dozen different dashboards out to the public to help find food to help find vaccinations, you know, go down the list. But now, I have to say in the last several months almost every new board motion, specifically calls for a visualization of some port sort. So it's put a lot of extra visibility on what we all do in the data analytics and visualization and mapping, which is great. It got me the ability to hire for new people in the middle of a hiring freeze. They're not, you know, so that's a good thing for from a GIS perspective. But it also has put a tremendous amount of extra workload on the teams across the county who do this stuff because they don't, you know, they suddenly went from doing a little bit to everything. But we've also used that to leverage some structural change are, you know, we're big so we're more siloed. Our GIS team now has a strong working relationship with our business intelligence team who does the Microsoft BI dashboards, they've cross trained each other so they understand we can share data between platforms and systems and build out useful tools that in the past before the pandemic, those were two different worlds and nobody talked to each other. Another thing and Carol alluded to this with the media loving to find mistakes. I think it's actually opened us up much more to the idea of open data and sharing information, and everyone's afraid to share data because they're afraid of getting criticized but the flip side that I'm trying to point out to folks is, if we share data, we can make it better, because people help us find gaps and errors that we can then fix. So, I mean you have to play that politic a little bit with the media or the others carefully, but there's certainly a lot more value in improving our overall understanding when we share the data out in these tools because people can see it and respond to it and help us. I mean, where are you guys been my whole lives I it's like we're best friends and known each other because we're in simpatico realm so yeah Steve all over that I feel like at least over the last year in particular, we kind of got into this debate of Python versus are, you know we had the business intelligence folks and huge numbers of people that were doing, you know power BI or tableau. And then on the other side of the spectrum was the GIS folks, you know, what we use, you know, dawns on someone pick on her and Esri just a little bit too so we use a lot of as your products. And there was this this divide you know is the GIS crowd versus kind of the data analytics crowd and you know we've really crossed some real good barriers there is is and what we're saying now is is just RSPs. We just need some really smart people. Right, the GIS folks are really smart people the data analytics are really smart people and you get the two of them together. And they get into arguments about you know different types of coding and that's fine but you're going to get some really amazing analytics to come out of it. And so I think that has been a huge progress that we've seen just recently I mean within the last two to three months. Maybe to go back to the original part of the question is, because of things like ArcGIS online and not to endorse that I don't, I don't want to do that but we did use ArcGIS online as a platform. We had 50 states mic'd up we had nonprofits we had over 500 applications around in and around the initial part of COVID. Yeah, there's a lot of duplication. Because everybody was picking up those restful endpoints is restful API's and copying and pasting good practice but it, you know, people are taking, take a good idea and then run with it. The first thing that really happened was they took a really good idea, use it as a baseline and then build on top of that and what I saw, especially with PPE tracking and you know they they they really address some of these issues that we had with supply chain, because they had a really solid baseline and then we're able to build on top of that scale very quickly so a lot of, a lot of progress, both last year and then recently with this integration of better data analytics, writ large. Great, thank you. Our committee member Elizabeth root has a question. Elizabeth if you want to unmute and ask that. Sure. So, very interesting to hear this discussion about visual presentation of all of this information, especially to the public. So I worked with the Ohio Department of Health in the EOC here for quite a while during the first six months of the pandemic and we saw this incredible proliferation of dashboards to the tune of like, by the end of the six months there were 200 separate dashboards, representing data either internally or externally to the public. It became actually fairly unproductive right it was just you build another dashboard, and then actually didn't really get used right because it was just another dashboard that was showing somebody's, frankly, pet project right on that on that dashboard data. So I wonder if you wouldn't mind commenting on you know how do we stop that from happening how do we actually make that productive right. Thank you. Sorry, I got to jump on that one too so, and then I really will get off and I'll shut up, but this is exciting to be a part of this panel. Back in August or November, I think it was November. I gave a presentation to our senior leadership that that all I really had was a picture of Times Square, New York City. And, and that's what was happening for us we have a EOC, we call it the National Response Coordination Center. There's 55 large screen TVs in the NRCC. And each one is curated, you know, and we've got all the major news networks and you walk in and it's like Times Square, and the dashboards were crazy and that was the, that was the presentation I gave to our senior leadership is, you know which dashboard do you look at mama me or do you look at Shrek or which which Broadway played you want to go see today. And so, a we really need a better dashboard strategy. We need to be technology agnostic. It doesn't need to be a single branded thing you really need to be technology agnostic. And so we and actually because of this, we have actually pivoted to create an entire analytics team and analytics so that that there's data the collection of data, curating data by these life lines, putting them into the dashboard strategy where you're actually using AI to pull out the signal and the noise but you don't stop there you can't just give a dashboard to a senior leader and ask them that they're now going to have an intuitive clairvoyance based on all these 55 dashboards and know what you're trying to communicate. You need to take it one step further and that's what we're doing with our analytics cell is is we're not stopping at the dashboard using the dashboards to actually create a separate analytics group that curates that information and reduces that signal and reduces that noise and says these are the co is in the courses of action that you need to take based on this plethora this opinion of information. These are the things you need to pay attention to these are the five things during this incident at this moment, which you need to pay attention to. Yeah, I'll piggyback on that is that we it's really about pulling out the key findings and having someone and that goes again to having people who are more data centric or data analysts experts that wasn't always part of what we fundamentally felt was embedded in emergency management that data wasn't driving and as available as what we've experienced in the last year. And so I think having, you know, having those folks really decipher and say what do you need to know and take away. You know, and obviously this has been a really unique situation where I think everyone's playing around and learning their capabilities but what we're doing now is, you know, transforming how we do our reporting and starting to pre can what new dashboards are like so again pandemic is once in a lifetime but now saying okay now that we built this capability how do we re envision what our heat reporting looks like and what our winter weather and coastal storm reporting looks like so I think taking this now is allowing us to still back and again it's always about your audience at the end of the day and what they need to what they need to know. And to the discussion I agree with all of the above is for especially for our public facing dashboarding and visualization tools. We were very careful to limit the number so we didn't have 200 of them at the end of the day. I think at our peak public facing we maybe had 10 to 12. We were very targeted so this one's for how you can get food if you are you know family out of school lunch program and now your kids aren't at school where you go can do food book apps or get it you know go down the list vaccines Wi-Fi, so on but they were very targeted but the other thing we did is we deprecated stuff. So if a dashboard was only relevant for a period of three months at the end of three months we made sure it went away and we had. I won't say a super formalized process although it got better over time, we had a process to decide through the EOC chain of command when a dashboard or a visualization or a visualization or map or whatever it would be that made public and what it's what its purpose would be and and then at what point it maybe comes down because it's no longer relevant. So, you know we we tried to contain that beast a little bit so that it wasn't just anybody in any department across the county who wanted to throw a dashboard on the site. We could do that and that for us is handled through our county you know PIO. So that sort of controlled the messaging, and over time it also helped us to get some standards and practices around what those dashboards and visualizations looked like. So, you know for the public, they didn't have to learn a new interface every time they went to a dashboard for something they were all sort of using the same templates and color schemes and branding and low, you know and symbols and so on. You know, getting as Heather said getting some norms for how you're going to do that over time. It's hard in the midst of it but we tried, and I think we'll all get better as we go forward. And this is Carol I would agree with what everyone said I think what we learned is less is more. The fewer data points the fewer and keeping it consistent in the look and the field so like you said Steve people know how to navigate it easily. I think some of the confusion that we had early on, especially as people would call and say well the dashboard from this university or the dashboard from that national entity shows Idaho is doing this and your dashboard shows So I mean it wasn't just our local dashboards that they were having issues that they're trying to compare us across the country to other people's dashboards and it's been a learning experience but we truly have learned that less is is more. Great. Thank you all for your input really lively panel we really appreciate it. I have another question from the audience that takes us more to the international realm, and maybe Chris you're probably going to be the best one to response to this but the others may have something to add. One of the audience asks, regarding the infrastructure and technology issue has has FEMA or any of you consulted with us a ID, they have myriad humanitarian and disaster assistance response situations at all scales from tiny to country and even region and they've developed solutions for a lot of those are any of those practices being looked at, or are we borrowing things from them are we sharing things with the international organizations. Yeah, well yeah to speak to USA. You know so carry stokes is is over there is is kind of my counterpart for USA ID. You know we we we run in similar circles. The last time I think we were really heavily involved in something with USA ID would have been maybe the Haiti earthquake, just because of the proximity of the US and how close it was to Haiti. Actually, an international, we do routinely deal with the international community from a geospatial perspective and I. I got to be careful about you know I'm not picking on anybody or endorsing anybody but we have a real strong a very strong partnership with the Copernicus emergency management system. We routinely activate Copernicus and they do a lot of amazing things, you know all the way from a very local level all the way up to a EU perspective so absolutely and the flip side of that is we you at the US is very geographically rich we're very blessed we have a lot of infrastructure we have a lot of data we have a lot of connections and capabilities. And so yes it's a it's it's absolutely a top priority for our team to try to share and communicate, because a flood is a flood is a flood of flood in, you know, Texas is is is still water in Sri Lanka or Bangladesh so the lessons that we've learned from all the rich data that we get satellite aerial US ground based high watermarks. That entire workflow can be transplanted over there to to a country that may not have those same resources, and then conversely they do amazing things actually on the book ends from a preparedness and a long term recovery standpoint from economic monitoring through geographic technologies that I'm envious of, you know, so we just had a meeting last week with Copernicus and yeah we do that a lot. We try to we try to keep keep up with them and vice versa. Absolutely. I have another question from the audience that relates to filling the data gaps and checking data, validating data. And the question is, are any of all of you using the youth mappers to assist in disaster response, or any of these other organizations that have the funds to bring in volunteered information and evaluate existing data sets. I'll just open that to. I'll jump in. Not familiar with youth mappers but I'm going to find out about that after this. Thank you for that link. But yeah here in LA County and I know many places across country maybe Heather as well, and is where we we worked with a organization nonprofit that spun up for the pandemic I think they're going to continue called US digital response. And they helped us on a couple of big projects where we didn't have the full capacity to them ourselves so that's that's the same kind of an idea there are it professionals that volunteer time and reach out to work on government projects where the capacity is lacking. And that was very successful for us to partner with that outside entity, and we were able to work with them so that they understood our technology stack and data requirements. So they built stuff and then we could adjust it into our into our infrastructure. Our hardware and software infrastructure so we could maintain these things but that was a great way to juice the development of certain tools we need to help with quickly. And the other place we a little bit more peripherally work closely with was your it says GIS core. Same thing and they did a lot of work nationally on, you know, on vaccination sites and testing sites in particular but we were. I'm privileged that the, the director, the staff director for you for that group is in Long Beach so and I know her personally so I could lean on her a little bit to help us out. Yes, leveraging, you know, external resources was huge to build that extra surge capacity when we needed it. And I think that's another place where maybe, you know, holistically understanding that landscape of available resources there's many others out there as well, and how to coordinate those organizations to support us, it would be really valuable. Yeah, so FEMA actually has a crowd sourcing unit when we activate the inner CC we stand up a crowd sourcing unit. That's a relatively new concept for us that actually didn't start until about Hurricane Irma. So if you think about Harvey Irma and Maria Harvey the peace apps went down the Cajun Navy deployed coast guards trying to deal with search and rescue water missions with water rescue missions. And then back to back we rolled right into Irma and we brought this up to our senior leadership, my favorite line of my entire career. They said if not now when. So they gave us the green light to launch a crowd sourcing unit we've been doing it since Hurricane Irma. We, we activate them routinely we did activate your sgis core for this pandemic and you're right the pandemic, the vaccine trackers as well as all the stuff that they were doing was prolific. There's probably in the neighborhood of 20 or 30 digital volunteer groups that we routinely engage with the email is FEMA dash crowd sourcing at FEMA dot dhs dot gov. Just amazing people international communities and just amazing people involved in this space doing all things, all kinds of things from tracking shelters to food water and water bottles and you know resources that are available it's really, it's really an amazing thing. Carol do you have anything to add to that are you using volunteer organizations in your data efforts. I don't know the answer I said but I don't have. I guess team is probably engaged. I don't know about the volunteer efforts specifically to the geodata piece. Yeah, no, being quite world where sometimes looked at as the one that has the capacity, and our capacity is very limited on this so we're watching others. Maybe as, as Steve suggested there'd be some way to organize that so that it's accessible and, and different jurisdictions don't have to build up the volunteer effort from scratch. I want to make sure we circle back to things that should be done. When we're not in the pandemic to prepare us for the next disaster when we're not in the next disaster. There's one comment from the audience that's really more of a comment than a question. And what this person says is that post pandemic emergency response should involve mental health as well, at least in many countries like mine where things are slower and less responsive than in developed countries. I don't know if you have any response to that or comments. I'm going to start that Pat, and actually mental health has been a big component of all of our responses over the years and, and my partners with the mental health community and, and making sure that the, the public has access and we have those resources available. I think my, my comments earlier. Seeing it affect our staff as much as we had the public in the past. So that was a new awakening for me that we are part of that public and I need to make sure that our employees are included in that mental health prevention, not just the recovery. As we've gone through and I think the pandemic has brought that more to light on that mental health side, but we do have great mental health partners that work with our response our volunteers that work in our communities on normal disaster response on mental health as well. Great. Thank you. Yeah, and I agree mental health has always been part of our response planning are it's our department of health and mental hygiene is our health agency's name. But certainly I think COVID has brought it out as really, really as a focal point of impact from this event and we talk a lot about it in the COVID recovery planning and what wait be the more long term impact there and so there's been quite a lot about resource navigation and part of those community networks and helping build into kind of the case management community information really bolstering the mental health services. And I'll echo I think this event really the prolonged nature, I think really emphasize the response workers to and their mental health that's become quite a large part of the conversation about, you know, especially as we were planning for wave two and kind of caught our breath after wave one was really trying to build that into a lot of our planning and scheduling and staffing and services and everything. Thank you, Heather. Any other comments on that. One aspect that we haven't touched too much on since we've been delving so deeply into technology is the, the infrastructure and the space. And before we have to wrap up in a few minutes I wonder if anybody has any comments on that aspect of preparedness and disaster response the the non technology the hard infrastructure side. Carol, I'll just have a comment. So from the public health on the ground. We have always practiced that when public health would have an emergency that we needed to be involved with that SNS would raise and they would come rescue us with all of these SNS supplies that are, you know, all over the world. And with COVID the way it was and it hit so strongly everywhere our supplies quickly were not available at all. So not technology but gloves and masks and capes and drapes and syringes and sharps containers and needles and alcohol and sanitizer, all of those things that we, I guess had we have some but we had the expectation that if a disaster happens that public health related SNS has all those supplies ready to go. We've learned a lot about what preparedness we need to actually have on the ground in order to keep ourselves at a place of readiness in in some of those supply stocks. I had some but oh my goodness not nearly enough and I think Chris has mentioned as as the supply chains. Nobody could find any and we're still we're still in the supply chain void, as it comes to needles and syringes and sharps containers and, and other things that we still need for a medical disaster. Yeah, and I think I just say, along that same line, you know, this is so different than any other disaster we're used to dealing with because everyone in the world hit God hit at the same time. You know when you have a fire or a flood or a hurricane, you can bring supplies in from somewhere else because they're not experiencing the same disaster at the same time. So this is just something I think we never thought of or certainly never prepared for in the way that everyone has the same problem. I don't know a lot about our supply chain other than my department head loves to brag how he cornered the market on and 95 masks, and, and we had, we had more mass that we could possibly need in LA County. We actually started sharing them out, you know, around the region, or, you know, to other entities, but I think that's a tale of a big, well funded, you know, massive county like LA versus a more rural, you know, environment that's what it rolls in is, you know, we had the resources and the people to go and the connections to go corner the market on certain things, which, you know, arguably is not the way we should be doing it, we should be planning more proactively and ahead of time than scrambling for who's got the money and the connections to get the stuff. So, I think it's a lesson learned I don't know what the solutions are. That's not GIS. Any comments to add on on infrastructure needs and maybe even physical space and things like that. Yeah. You know, I called it an invisible disaster but there really was actually, you know, a team of people that were very focused on the physical component. The logistics team, certainly on all the PPE supply, but, and then and BCPs for mortality for hospital surge. We space wise though our actual department design design and construction was very active in doing contracts and building out a lot of search space for us we had to adapt I mean, New York City, you know, obviously we're very density that's got very very vacancy rates normally. And then an emergency we always say you know the challenge is always space and it was interesting in this event that we space was not our issue we had all the space you know hotels as I mentioned my profile I ran the hotel program suddenly hotels were actually available for us to use for isolation and quarantine and to shelter our health care workers. So we were able to take these often very operational places and convert them over into search space so whether it was hospital surge and I think it was also central park became a search space. Our vaccine sites right now I think it's been really successful and converting many centers. And now we're everywhere but really taking these spaces and really rapidly converting them so there's been quite a lot of adapting our built environment to serve this disaster. Great. Thank you for that. It's been a really lively discussion, and I want to thank all of the panelists for weighing in. So actively and bringing us rich stories from their own local experience and it was really interesting to see the differences across the scales from rural to urban, and from the data management side to the on the ground side. We're going to take a short break now. We're going to come back at two o'clock, and we'll hear two presentations from two researchers who are dealing with research on disaster response during the pandemic. So thank you all for all your participation and your good questions in the first session, and we'll see you in about 15 minutes. Welcome back to the geographical Sciences Committee panel on preparing for multiple disasters COVID and disasters at the same time. Is the screen sharing on can everyone see the screen with the session to great. Thank you, Thomas. Well, we're going to have two talks now between now until about 245 Eastern 1145 Pacific from two people who are working on aspects of preparing society to deal with hazards and disasters and multiple disasters at the same time. I'm going to first introduce me home as a radio. She will be our first speaker. Miho is an associate professor of architecture and urbanization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is director of the urban risk lab, working on a large territorial scale with an interest in public spaces and the urban experience. She is known for her work in disaster resilience. In the urban risk lab, multidisciplinary groups of researchers work to innovate on technologies, materials, processes and systems to reduce risk. Depending on several scales, the lab develops methods to embed risk reduction and preparedness into the design of regions, cities and urban spaces to increase the resilience of local communities. Prior to her work at MIT, Missouri taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and the University of Toronto. Her design work on disaster prevention has been exhibited globally. As the director of the urban risk lab at MIT, Missouri is collaborating on a number of projects with institutions and organizations in the field of disaster reconstruction and prevention, and is currently working in Haiti, India, Japan and Chile. Miho is formerly an associate at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and has also worked in the offices of Shigeru Ban and Dan Kiley. Miho, are you ready to take over? We're going to move on now to our second speaker, Stephen Quiring, and he's going to give a presentation. Then we'll have time for a few specific questions after him. It's followed by a general discussion with questions for all the panelists and we're happy to get questions from the audience. And again, audience members, please put your questions in the Q&A box. Stephen Quiring is a professor in the Atmospheric Sciences Program, Department of Geography at the Ohio State University. Stephen Quiring's research focuses on hydroclimatology and weather data analytics. A major focus of his research is modeling the impact of hurricanes and other severe weather on electrical power systems. He and his collaborators have been developing models to predict weather related power outages, damage, and outage duration since 2006. With a number of utilities, including Southern Company, Southern California Edison, AEP, First Energy, and Guangdong Power to support their storm impact modeling efforts. His models are being utilized operationally by these utilities to support their storm preparation and response activities. Stephen, if you're ready to go, please share your screen and go ahead. Thank you very much for the introduction and for this opportunity to present on the work that we're doing. And today what I'd like to talk about is specifically the compound risks that arose as a result of one particular event during the COVID pandemic. And that's related to the power outages in Texas. And so, as was mentioned, my research team provides weather data analytics and models to support electrical utilities and to do that both in terms of short term pre-storm preparation. We're looking at things a few days to a few hours before an event takes place so that electrical utilities can better pre-position their crews so that they know how many assets they need to recover after storm damage and also to identify the locations in their service territory that will be hardest hit. Electrical utilities are fairly proactive because if the power is off, obviously your meter is not running and they're not getting paid. And of course utility commissions are providing oversight of electrical utilities and making sure that they are providing reliable service to the customers. So there is an incentive for them to respond to storms in an appropriate way. On the one hand they don't want to be too prepared because that means that they've brought in more crews than they need and have paid more double overtime than is required. And they don't want to be caught underprepared because that's when there are very prolonged outages. Weather and power outages are an ongoing concern in the United States. So today I'm going to talk a little bit about overall context, a little bit about the specifics of the event. So what happened in February of this year and what some of the impacts of that were and then reflect on some of the lessons learned. And so when we look at Department of Energy data over the last couple of decades, we can see that major weather related disruptions to the electrical power system are common. That in a typical year we might have upwards of 140 major power outage events, and the majority of those when we look at the number of customers interrupted are due to weather. There's also indications that the number of these events are increasing over time and that's both related to changes in the weather and climate system. So climate change and the impacts that it's having on storminess and also natural variability within the climate system when we talk about things like hurricanes and the hurricane season. And also the aging infrastructure in the United States and the growing population makes this a significant issue. These events occur today we'll be talking about Texas but these types of events can occur in all locations in the United States. And so this shows from 2003 to 2017, the number of events that have occurred in each state. These are the major power disruptions and then how many customers have been affected. And so not surprisingly the more popular states show up in a map where we're showing the number of customers affected. And we've also looked at this in terms of what types of weather events are really driving these major disruptions and while hurricanes make landfall less frequently and occur less frequently than thunderstorms and winter storms. When we think about the number of people affected in a given year. They are have a slight advantage over thunderstorms which occur more frequently but tend to have less significant impacts. And winter storms winter weather which we'll be talking about now is legs considerably behind the other two categories if we're just counting the number of people that are affected. When we look at overall. So obviously we just sort of zoomed into thinking about power disruptions but this can be a more general relationship to infrastructure and to the impacts of weather as it comes to our society and economics and so I just wanted to throw in this graphic which shows kind of the longer term perspective. When we think about why putting these kinds of tools in the hands of decision makers are important because these events occur frequently and have a significant both economic and social So let's zoom in and talk a little bit about the specifics of what happened in Texas and in the southern United States in February of 2021. This nice summary was put together and I strongly recommend that if you want to see some of these details and read about it. In more detail that you visit the skip website so this is one of the Noah recess and this document is available that I've called some of this information from at southern climate dot work. So the major cold snap that occurred and multiple rounds of snow storms this event set nearly 3000 temperature records in the month of February in the south central United States and these conditions while they were most pronounced around the middle of February extended for more than two weeks in some areas. In February 16 nearly 73% of the United States was covered by snow and the snow that fell with this system extended to places like Galveston where it is obviously quite unusual. In terms of impacts early estimates from this event and these numbers are still being finalized estimated about $300 billion in total estimated losses and just in the state of Texas over 200 fatalities were associated with this event, both in terms of and also some issues related to carbon monoxide poisoning issues related to vehicle accidents and some for whom they have are dependent on electricity for their medical devices and those prolonged outages, then caused substantial harm in that way. So we'll talk a little bit more about these other two bullet points as I walk through. So as a climatologist by training I can't help but show some of the unique climatological aspects of this event to kind of put it into a longer term context. All this was very severe and we can see this if we look at the number of daily temperature records either for minimum temperatures, or maximum daily temperatures that were set in Texas in Oklahoma in Arkansas, Louisiana and also surrounding states. And so this map shows the locations of the stations where those monthly temperature records were recorded and you can note that it wasn't just Texas. And even though there was a lot of press about what went on in Texas this was a much more widespread event. We can also see the severity of it and the spatial extent if we look at this map that shown here, which is the departure in average daily maximum temperature for February of 2021. And so this broad swath of the Central United States had temperatures that were more than 25 degrees Fahrenheit colder than normal for that day. However, this is not the only or the worst necessarily cold event that has occurred in the observational period, we have other record setting cold events that occurred in 1899. In 1983, there wasn't a similar event that disrupted power and water systems and resulted in an estimated 500 deaths. In 1989, the cold snap was associated with more than $1.5 billion in infrastructure damage. And more recently in 2011, Texas experienced cold conditions that also resulted in disruptions to the power system. It was the coldest winter weather event to occur in 30 years in many of the southern states like Texas, but it was not completely unprecedented in the longer term record. So what were the impacts there as most people were aware, substantial and prolonged power outages over much of the state of Texas and this is somewhat unique to the geography and to the power infrastructure system in Texas and Texas has its own electricity grid. That's managed by the Electric Electric Reliability Council of Texas or ERCOT. And by design, it does not cross state boundaries and is largely unconnected with the other power systems the rest of the grid in the United States. There are some parts of the state that are not part of ERCOT. So for example El Paso and the panhandle and some parts of East Texas and we'll come back to that in a map that I show later on. And according to ERCOT, the Texas grid was seconds and minutes away from a complete collapse. And so as a result of this, they began proactively shedding load and implementing power outages and rolling blackouts to protect the integrity of the grid. And this resulted in millions of customers. So here a customer is a business or a residential customer. So you have to multiply this number by three or four depending on what the average residential occupation density would be to get the number of people affected. So half to two thirds of the state's population experienced either momentary or prolonged or extended power outages as a result of this. And this image here shows one example of what that kind of looked like. And what happened most of the modeling that we do focuses on the impacts of storms on the power systems so high winds or ice loading taking down power lines taking down towers causing vegetation to impact power systems. On the other hand was entirely or primarily on the generation side. And so two factors caused this first an increase in demand so demand peak that 69,000 megawatts as a result of the record cold temperatures and people cranking the electric heat in their homes to try and stay warm. And this exceeded the worst case analysis which was based on that 21 2011 event that I talked about that was the previous storm of record for these cold events. At the same time that demand peaked electricity production dropped substantially and this nice graphic from the New York Times shows that. So most of the generation in Texas is based on natural gas. And we can see that just prior to it, a lot of the production going offline. It was at a very high level the vast majority of the production in Texas comes from natural gas and while there were declines. And some of the coal fire generating plants one of the nuclear plants went offline. Some of the wind turbines had to be taken offline. But most of the decline and shed load shedding was due to natural gas. So basically pumps that froze pipes that froze and equipment that was not designed to deal with these cold weather issues. So as I mentioned, I work with some utilities one of which serves a million customers in Texas. This is what their outages look like. And so they have only one million customers but on the 15th of February 1.4 million customers lost power, which indicates the rolling nature of this so individual customers lost power multiple times over the course of that day, and about 1.3 million of those 1.4 million were due to generation issues. So there were also some weather some storm related impacts from snow from high winds and those kinds of things. So it goes at a county level the percentage of customers that were without power at 10am on February 16. And so you can see that much of Texas had in some cases substantial numbers of customers without power, but not El Paso. Not so much the Texas panhandle so the places outside of her cot were less impacted by this event. What were the COVID complications that we have talked a number of times about this kind of idea of colliding disasters or compounding situations so in this case, this the electricity outages led to low water supply for long power outages this cause people to do things like try and run their barbecue inside or a vehicle some of the recarbon monoxide issues. Individuals who required medical treatment. Often we're not able to receive it because those clinics closed. And so this map just shows the location of electricity dependent beneficiaries, Texas nursing homes and also power outages. And so, unfortunately, in some of the places where there's concentrations of these there's also a lot of people who are dependent on electricity for their health. So to wrap up with some lessons learned. One is about infrastructure resilience. It is very possible to winterize and prevent cold weather from shutting down natural gas power plants and that successfully done and much the United States outside of Texas, and in other parts of the world. And after 2011, there was a recommendation to do this but it was not enforced and because Urquhart falls within does not cross state boundaries then it is exempt from federal oversight and regulation. And there was some articles about how green energy was to blame for this which was not true but there were some wind turbines that were taken offline because they also had not been adequately winterized. And that technology exists and as possible. The Texas grid is isolated. That makes it more vulnerable. There's lots of information available to forecast this event this was not a surprise weather event there was a long lead time so pre event planning could have helped prepare for this. Also long term preparation, they had a similar event in 2011 and that could have helped to inform things. Most of the planning that's done including my work with electrical utilities is for individual events, so it does not account for multiple events occurring in short order, or these events, whether related events occurring in a pandemic or other kind of major disruption to society. We can also see that from the data presented at the beginning that there is at the same time as increasing weather events, increasing vulnerability to those events because of aging infrastructure and long term lack of investment. And of course, as presenters have mentioned today and me host stress in her presentation this disaster had a disproportionate impact. So, this image shows the city of Austin. On one side we have locations where there is power on the other side we have locations where there is not power. This is a decision made by the electrical utility company, and perhaps for good reason to keep a hospital electrified. Those living in lower income neighborhoods experienced much longer power outages and much more frequent power outages and so this also has an impact and is an issue that needs to be addressed when we deal with these kinds of disasters so with that I will stop I think I have exceeded my allocated time. Thank you Steven that was very interesting and gave us a little look into a different kind of disaster that we hadn't been discussing previously. Very, very interesting work. I'm happy to take questions from the committee or the other panelists or the audience, and maybe we'll focus a couple of questions on Steven first and then our questions will become more general and it would be great to look at interactions and across the different topics that we've heard about today. So, so I have a couple of questions for you Steven to get started. In a power outage so many individual households are hit and they happen geographically there's a block or large area that goes out and in some of the previous talks we've, we've heard about the concept of caring and sharing and community networks and can you tell me whether, you know to what extent that happened as a response in the Texas case, if you if you have some information on this. So for community networks of any kind spatial community religious community whatever able to help alleviate some of the impact. Has the power company been looking at that. Did they know how to how their customers responded. Anything you can give us on that topic. Thank you great question. And so anecdotally, there is lots of evidence that religious organizations and community organizations and other social networks stepped up in a huge way to provide informal support shelter. So this, there was evidence of this on Facebook through community organization, and especially the way the electrical power grid works, because an individual circuit where I live. There's two circuits, the circuit that I'm on across is different than the one across the street so there are situations where my neighbors may have electricity and I do not. You know what happened in the Texas case. And so that was one way where people were able to come together. But of course, that is also a challenge in the midst of COVID, where there were restrictions or or precautions around getting people together in a house who are not related so it did happen. I would say the electrical utility that I'm working with is not directly has not directly looked at kind of what what happened from a social standpoint, they have mostly focused on their response to sort of their crews, how quickly they were able to respond thinking about where and when they should, how they should prioritize different circuits in terms of turning the power back on. Great, thank you. Yeah, I guess I'm not surprised at that answer but I wanted to ask. Yes, a question he has his hand raised would you unmute yourself, but and ask the question. Okay, I don't have those controls so somebody is making this magic happen. So that's where a little bit of a delay is coming from so I appreciate your patience. Even that was a fantastic presentation and I'll connect up with you separately because I lead the DOE's effort for which is a capability called Eagle Eye, which monitors these outages in real time. So I have a question that connects what you just described versus what Miho just talked about right. So, how can we change the design of these areas where sort of green technologies or solar panels that add resiliency to your power. We saw Ford F-150s powering homes and, and, you know, medical supplies. Are you actively, do you think that the utilities are thinking about those that, you know, just so they are not solely looked upon the bad people creating this kind of a challenge that they should encourage. You know, there is an economic conflict, right? If everybody generates their own electricity, it will create a challenge for the utilities particularly. So do you think that we could, you know, push faster penetration of those green technologies, energy technologies, to mitigate as part of the urban design? Yeah, there are lots of useful solutions and mitigation and preparation and infrastructure hardening. So microgrids, distributed generation, the behind the meter solar panels and other kinds of green technologies that can be used at the household business level for generating and batteries for storing electricity at your own residence. Obviously those, again, who had the ability to run a generator or who had a generator were able to prevent some of the hardship from occurring. So there are lots of solutions that exist. I think there are in different states and different utilities programs to kind of incentivize and encourage those. Obviously, Texas at an ERCOT level knew what it could have done after 2011, and there are some, yeah, political repercussions that will be felt from not having prepared. Thank you. Thank you. I'm not seeing any more questions from the panel right now. Another thought that occurred to me is, how different is the response to a heat wave versus a cold wave? In a heat wave, we also have increased demand. And does that have a different spatial pattern or a different kind of response than a cold wave? That's a great question. For the modeling that we do, there absolutely are different impacts depending on the types of weather events that occur. And from a disaster preparation and response standpoint, there are some commonalities that in terms of how you might respond. So in both extreme cold and extreme heat, there's an increase in demand. And at the same time, there can be a reduction in generation in both of those cases. And typically, the response has been to have things like centralized cooling centers where people who don't have power or are unable to afford air conditioning or don't have the means to go somewhere can come to a community center or a centralized location. And same thing happens during extreme cold events that many municipalities will open up shelters so that people can get out of the cold and have a place to warm up. And that has worked in the past. And I don't know if you treat each disaster individually, but one of the challenging and fascinating components of the last year has been because of this compound cascading nature of things, the past solutions that worked. And Miho referred to this in her presentation. Which is that the way that some of these things are designed may not work well in a pandemic and may not be suitable, whether it's it's heat or cold or a hurricane occurring. That's going to cause issues and sometimes we want to move people out of the way or move people to a safe location but where is that safe location now. And what does that how do we need to design and implement that. That's a great point. Um, it definitely does bring back the issue of design of public spaces that Miho address designing them as cooling centers, designing them as warming centers, designing them as shelters, designing them for people to be able to enter in a dispersed way. I don't know if Miho has anything to weigh in on that but what about some of these chronic disasters versus more drawn out disasters and the compounding effect of maybe hurricane evacuation at the same time there are power outages. And how do those things interact in the design of spaces. Can we solve it through schools or do we really need to think of other kinds of spaces. I wonder if Carol Morley is still on from a rural perspective. What does her community do for shelters. What are you planning to do for the coming year, and it's going to be a much different context from the urban areas. Thank you and just like Miho said, we have typically our shelters have been in our school gymnasium, or perhaps our, we have a couple little strip malls that have been converted into math shelters, but with coven that wasn't the case at all. We found more with coven. If we use our forest service as an example we sheltered and isolated them in hotel rooms that were individual. Again, air systems that circulate use of common uses of bathrooms and things like that when we're looking at a disease entity doesn't work for shared spaces like we do if it's outdoor air quality from the smoke and the fires. We are assessing that right now for future as well to see how we can make this a broader shelter issue for a varied degree of disasters not just for our outdoor air quality is what we typically had our shelters for in the past. Thank you. Any other comments anybody else would like to weigh in on that issue. I have another topic I just like to kind of throw out to the panelists in general all of you who are who are still here and it's from my experience in my own community. And that is the homeless population. We have a big homeless population in Eugene a big one in Portland a lot of West Coast cities have that problem perhaps more than some of the eastern cities. Serving the homeless touches on almost all of the problem areas that people have brought up today. Shelter health information. How do we get information about the homeless so we can serve them better. If any of the panelists or speakers have any experience from their work on new solutions that have emerged for addressing support for homeless people during disasters and the pandemic. Just open it up to any speaker who wants to comment. I'll attempt to jump in on this it's a complex problem for us in LA County obviously I hear different numbers on how many homeless we have. The big problem is just getting a handle on where how many there are where they are, what their patterns of movement are through different times of the year because there are migrations so to speak, based on weather and other things. I think this goes to some of the things me address and some of the things I brought up about you know just how we communicate with populations, I mean whether they're housed or unhoused I think it doesn't really matter at some level. Social cultural language, you know socioeconomic and so on limitations. And I think one of the problems we and many others probably have with the homeless population in particular is one, we don't really know where they are. I mean, the, the, the, I guess the, you know the Keystone data set on homeless populations usually the point in time count, it's done once a year in January, and then we pretend like we know everything about our population. And if I have a pandemic that hits in March or April and I'm trying to go out and do outreach. The January data doesn't help me because people have moved now there are certain places there we expect and know we'll see people. And I think the hardest part of that is the less visible part because again, you know, we don't, we see people camped out along the sidewalks or under the bridges and things like that but we don't see the ones that are more hidden. And I think the related piece in context pandemic is tracking people once they're entering the system and it's not unique to the pandemic but once you start doing outreach and providing services to somebody who's on house. It's hard to follow them through the system. It's hard to know where did they go and what help did they get and then did they fall off the radar and obviously we can't put GPS tracking devices on individuals and follow them around but we can't put our hands around how to give people some kind of a common identifier in our computer databases so that we can know that somebody showing up in one part of the county this week is the same person and another part of the county next week so I think there's a lot around again the communication outreach and also understanding that population which is very different than the house population who for the most part are where we expect them to be when we want to reach out to them and their communities. Do you have something to add on that. Do you have a question would you like to unmute yourself and ask your question or comment. Yes. And there's my video. The homeless issue indeed so complex and I and I wonder, given the pandemic. I live in the inland empire which is east of Los Angeles County. And I'm sure Steve can speak to this as well in Los Angeles County because we're hearing so much about people who are becoming homeless they've never been homeless before, but because of the economic pressures of the pandemic. And we are now moving are forced to move into into that category. And I'm at a loss to know how we are able to to track them as well and to and as Steve mentioned, taking a homeless census in January and then thinking that we we have. We have the full picture is is so so unsatisfactory so so daunting. And to to bring that out also in case anyone on the the panels is working in in that area. And then also, it just seems to me to be the specter of environmental racism is is throughout all of this, especially with Stevens example of one half of Austin in that picture that he showed having power and the other half just next door, not having power for days different socio economic ethnic part of that city. That specter continues and from my standpoint as a mapper that that type of justice injustice mapping needs to continue as well. Thank you. Great comment on thank you. Go ahead. Well, since your name checked me I have to maybe try and weigh it. I think Don you bring up, you know, some good points I mean it and obviously, you know we do have a huge number of people who have moved out of, you know, stable housing into unstable situations in the pandemic. And again it's been disproportionate based on the kinds of work and, and you know opportunities, different communities have. We have good mechanisms for tracking that other than no, you know, obviously, a lot of parts of the country LA County included we put, you know eviction moratoriums and rental relief and all these other things but those things are going to go away at some point. And so I think we, you know we have governmental systems that capture information about people getting housing vouchers or other services that give us some sense. But again it's, it's, we don't have systems and you know that track these things through time and space in a meaningful way and I think that's, that's the tough part. Another thing I'll throw out I it's my insane idea about doing something better than a point in time count. I think there's an opportunity to actually use remote sensing to count, you know, non traditional shelters tense whatever they may be more frequently by doing image classifications we're not going to get them all by any stretch I definitely can see the tense on the sidewalks from the air I probably can see tense under the canopy in a park or hidden behind a wall or places that I don't see point time counts just drive down the street. So if you're not visible from the street you don't get counted at all. And that may give us a way to, you know, I think we need to be creative about moving away from field data collection all the time to field validation of remote collection methodologies you know other estimators. So that's my, my insane idea for the researchers who do remote sensing is, we need to find ways to do that. Great that's a really neat idea. I was just about to say remote sensing won't work for the homeless but maybe you've got some ideas that we should try it it should be tested. Any other questions or comments from the panelists on homeless or any of the other issues we've touched on. Well if not I want to thank all the panelists, the four panelists this morning Carol Morley Steve Steinberg, Chris Vaughan and Heather Reuter, and our two speakers this afternoon, Steve querying and me home as a very fascinating work from all of you, and very active discussion we really appreciate the active discussion. And this has provided a lot of food for thought for the geographical sciences community and I hope for our audience who is listening today, and our audience who will be able to view it later on online. So, a big round of applause for all of our speakers. Thank you very much. I think we'll wrap up now.