Hurricane Sandy

Summary

The Sahana Software Foundation is currently assisting community-based organizations with support and services around the management of mutual aid and assistance to populations affected by Hurricane Sandy in the northeastern United States – particularly in New York City and New Jersey. We have stood up a server (cloud hosted on Amazon EC2) that provides Sahana Eden capabilities customized and configured to the specific needs of disaster response operations for Hurricane Sandy.

This system has been initially designed to support the collection and aggregation of requests for material assistance and volunteers from the neighborhoods hardest hit by Hurricane Sandy: the Rockaways in Queens, Coney Island and Red Hook in Brooklyn, Staten Island and communities along the New Jersey coast. This will allow organizations, relief drop-off locations and individuals volunteering or donating needed relief items to more effectively prioritize and dispatch needed resources to where they are needed most. The system also provides a means of quickly conducting daily inventories to provide visibility and transparency, and allowing for more efficient and effective distribution of aid – connecting those in need with those who have.

Additional feature releases are planned to support volunteer registration and management, aggregation of individual building assessment data, and asset management.

Deployments

We have setup 3 instances:

• Hospitals Status Tracking.
• American Red Cross: Volunteer Management for Shelter Staffing
• OccupySandy managing Requests for Supplies & Volunteers

Additional Material

Hurricane Hackers presentation

Location Data

Boundaries and hierarchy:

• L0, L1 & L2 are in GADM (done)
• L3
  • Tiger: ​http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tgrshp2010/tgrshp2010.html
    • 1 L3 Borough in each L2 County
• L4
  • Brooklyn: ​http://geocommons.com/overlays/6090
  • Queens names: ​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Queens_neighborhoods
  • NY State civil boundaries: ​http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=927
    "boundaries of incorporated places in New York State (state, counties, cities, towns, villages, and Indian reservations)"
    (Note copyrighted.)
• Zipcodes -- polygons and parents
  • NYS
    • ​http://gis.ny.gov/gisdata/inventories/details.cfm?DSID=934
    • needs parenting to L3s via ​http://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/cancer/registry/appendix/neighborhoods.htm (done but this is only for NYC)
  • NJ
    • ​http://geocommons.com/overlays/22081
    • Could extract hierarchy from one of these:
      • ​http://www.brainyzip.com/state/zip_newjersey.html
      • ​http://newjersey.hometownlocator.com/zip-codes/counties.cfm
  • Important zipcode facts: ​http://www.maponics.com/products/gis-map-data/maps-reports/zip-code-maps/faqs/
    • Zipcodes can cross administrative region boundaries. They don't cross state boundaries, but do cross county boundaries. (For the population centers project, when we found a zipcode that spanned admin regions, we partitioned the zipcode -- made one location record for each partition. Names were qualified with the parent region.)
    • Zipcode regions are not technically polygons but rather groups of addresses.
    • USPS neither needs nor maintains boundary polygons.
    • Each zipcode is assigned by USPS to a city, but not by boundary inclusion -- rather, this is by which post office delivers mail to that zipcode. Thus lists of USPS-designated cities cannot be used for the location hierarchy.
    • Zipcodes have a prefix hierarchy.
      • ​http://stevemorse.org/jcal/zip.html
      • Three-digit zipcode prefixes by state: ​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ZIP_code_prefixes
• Full hierarchy w/o shapefiles is available from ​http://www.zip-codes.com/zip-code-database.asp for US$40. They allow looking up data in batches here ​http://www.zip-codes.com/search.asp, but would need to copy & paste the table part of the page into a file (not the html, just select the rows in the rendered page). Caution: We do not want to use copyrighted or proprietary material w/o the requisite payment or attribution. Could contact them and inquire about temporary use of the information.

Notes on uploading from csv files (incomplete)

• Location hierarchy & wkt
  CLI process to import location CSVs:

  auth.override = True
  resource = s3db.resource("gis_location")
  stylesheet = os.path.join(request.folder, "static", "formats", "s3csv", "gis", "location.xsl")
  import_file = os.path.join("/", "home", "data", "US_L2.csv")
  File = open(import_file, "r")
  resource.import_xml(File, format="csv", stylesheet=stylesheet)
  db.commit()
  

  • wiki:UserGuidelinesGISData
  • wiki:GIS/OpenStreetMap#Import