Understanding Risk – Innovation in Disaster Risk Assessment

The Understanding Risk Forum is this week in Washington D.C. at the World Bank. The intent of the event is to increase understanding of risk, make it more measurable and work on managing it better. FortiusOne is there in full force with myself and Bill Greer manning a booth in Innovation Fair and Andrew Turner participating in a panel on Open Source Spatial Web and Open Data on Thursday.

GeoCommons can be a valuable tool in understanding and managing risk.  One important aspect of understanding and mitigating risk is having the data to make decisions.  There is a variety of datasets available in GeoCommons that could contribute to risk assessments.  There are population grids for eight countries as well as flood risk information.  Along with providing public datasets Maker! can be used to disseminate risk assessments.  Someone cannot only view your assessment but also create their own map with other data or even download the raw information to be used in another system.  One example of such a risk map is this Flooding Model for White Plains, New York.

The booth as the Understanding Risk Forum was not all serious though.  Bill and I took a break to try out the hurricane wind simulator as well.  To find the simulator you just had to follow the hurricane tracks from outside the World Bank to the bright red “hurricane simulator.”

We took videos of the one minute simulation that created winds of up to 70mph, here is Bill’s reaction and my reaction.  The simulation was that of a category 1 hurricane.

In conjunction with the forum this week at the World Bank there is a Random Hacks of Kindness and CrisisCamp this weekend.  Look for some of the FortiusOne team there.