As the city of Seattle shut down in March 2020 to try to slow the spread of COVID-19, a group of 91探花 researchers got to work.

The team developed a project that scans the streets every few weeks to document what’s happening around the city 鈥� answering questions such as: Are people outside? Are restaurants open? This project, which began in May and will continue until at least fall of 2021, collects images of how Seattle has reacted to the pandemic and what recovery looks like. This creates a massive dataset that documents what was happening at any particular point in time. The researchers hope the data will help answer questions about what makes a city resilient and how to better prepare for potential future pandemics and other disasters.

The team will present this project Oct. 1 at the through the 91探花School of Public Health.

“We talk about resilience a lot in disaster sciences. There are lots of theories about what makes a community resilient to natural hazards, but we don’t fully understand resilience to pandemics, partially because we just haven’t been through these events at this scale,” said co-lead researcher , an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health sciences. “This project provided us with an opportunity to see what’s important for resilience in this context. What are people doing? Where are they recreating? Are they following distancing and mask-wearing recommendations? And how do their activities change as the pandemic progresses?”

Video footage taken from the team’s first drive on May 1, 2020.

To track what’s happening in Seattle, the researchers drive a car with a camera similar to Google Street View on top throughout the city.

“This is an amazing tool for quickly gathering highly perishable data from across the city,” said co-lead researcher , a professor of civil and environmental engineering. “Unless we capture these scenes now, these sights 鈥� and the rich data they contain 鈥� will be lost forever. I can already see a significant difference between the May dataset and what’s happening now. For example, when we first drove past Harborview Medical Center, no one was present on the block. Now it’s beginning to look like it used to.”

The team captured this series of photos from outside Harborview Medical Center between June and August 2020. The June photo shows very few people in the area. In July, there are people waiting at the bus stop. By August, there are more people at the bus stop and the surrounding areas.聽Credit: 91探花

The team’s route takes between eight and 11 hours to drive each time.

“We wanted the route to capture different aspects of the city 鈥� such as restaurants, hospitals, schools, parks and museums 鈥� and also make sure we had an equal representation across a variety of neighborhoods,” said co-lead researcher , a senior principal research scientist in the human centered design and engineering department.

The researchers try to start the drive at 8 a.m. on Friday, every few weeks, to maintain a consistent schedule, but it depends on weather, specifically the camera doesn’t work in the rain. They also drive on some Sundays to try to capture any variation between weekdays and weekends.

The Street-View-like camera creates huge datasets 鈥� each drive is turned into tens of thousands of images that make up an almost 2-terabyte file. So the researchers are developing algorithms to help them identify things such as cars, people and whether they are physically distancing in each frame. Identities 鈥� such as human faces and vehicle license plates 鈥� will be blurred.

“When people study disaster recovery, they often look at location data from smartphones or transaction data from debit or credit cards,” said co-lead researcher , an assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering. “But these data points do not necessarily capture everyone in a community. By looking at our images, I hope we are creating a dataset that better represents all people who live and work in Seattle.”

Any insights gained from this project, such as how people respond to mask recommendations or which populations might need more resources, can help other cities better understand their own recovery trends the researchers said.

“People talk about this as a 100-year pandemic, because the last major pandemic was in 1918,” Errett said. “Now conditions are much different 鈥� we have increased population density, climate change and more. I don’t think we’re going to be waiting another hundred years. So whatever we can do to learn from this experience will help us develop better policies and plans for the future.”

Jaqueline Peltier, an operations specialist in civil and environmental engineering; , a doctoral student in industrial and systems engineering; Christopher Salazar, a master’s student in industrial and systems engineering; and Vanessa Yang, an undergraduate student in statistics and informatics, are also part of this project. This research is funded by the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Errett at nerrett@uw.edu, Wartman at wartman@uw.edu, Miles at milessb@uw.edu and Choe at ychoe@uw.edu.

Grant number: 聽CMMI-2031119

In the days and weeks following an earthquake or hurricane, precious data about how buildings, bridges, roads, slopes and people fared in the disaster may get lost forever if well-equipped researchers are not able to enter the field rapidly.

Unstable buildings get bulldozed without documentation of how they were damaged, making it difficult to assess how building codes might be improved. Weather washes away key clues that could help us build more resilient communities. Many households are displaced, and some businesses will close forever.

At the 91探花, a new Post-Disaster, Rapid Response Research聽Facility funded by a $4.1 million National Science Foundation grant will provide necessary instrumentation and tools to collect and assess critical post-disaster data, with the goal of reducing physical damage and socio-economic losses from future events. 聽Part of a by the NSF’s Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure program, the RAPID Facility will make the data openly available to researchers, practitioners and policymakers.

“Often with rescue and response efforts, this very valuable data disappears really quickly,” said center director , a 91探花associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. “By collecting this data in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, we can begin to understand what went wrong and why. This allows us to better prepare and take precautionary measures in advance of future events.”

The RAPID Facility, an interdisciplinary center that will be housed in the 91探花Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will focus on two types of natural hazards: wind hazards, such as tornadoes and coastal storms, and earthquakes, which includes earthquake-induced ground failure and tsunamis. The center’s leadership team also includes faculty from the University of Florida, Oregon State University and Virginia Tech.

It will offer next-generation tools 鈥� laser scanning equipment, seismic instruments, mobile devices for social surveys and mixed-media recording, drones outfitted with cameras, sensors that can measure damage at the centimeter scale 鈥� and assistance to teams that can deploy in the aftermath of a disaster anywhere around the world. It will also offer training to communities who wish to conduct post-disaster investigations themselves, as well as assess the social costs of disasters.

The RAPID Facility will also create new software tools for transmitting, integrating, exploring and visualizing the complex data sets. These include mobile apps to assess structural damage in the field and a platform for mixed-media social data gathering. At the UW, a computer-automated virtual reality environment will also allow people to walk into a room and 鈥渟ee鈥� the disaster scene in three dimensions as if they were there. That technology was pioneered by partner Oregon State University, as the video below shows:

鈥淭he idea is that you can use the facility to collect data 鈥� either through our staff or our training 鈥� and then you can come to the center months later and recreate the field experience by walking through a damaged building or looking at how much a particular area flooded,鈥� Wartman said.

One of the center鈥檚 main goals is to better inform mathematical models used to predict how much damage buildings, bridges, levees and other key infrastructure will suffer in a certain sized earthquake or storm. By using data from actual disasters to uncover flaws in the models, communities can better prepare for real-world eventualities.

For instance, models currently predict how bridges from Seattle to the Eastside would perform in earthquakes of differing magnitudes. If those turn out to be off target, emergency managers may not have the right plans in place to ensure that hospitals on one side of the lake aren鈥檛 overburdened or supplies can get to where they need to go.

鈥淭hese computational models require real-world data to be calibrated and validated,鈥� said , 91探花associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and one of the center鈥檚 principal investigators. 鈥淧ost-disaster data will help us improve the various models necessary for understanding losses from natural disasters.鈥�

, a research scientist in human centered design and engineering and the third 91探花principal investigator, will lead the development of social science and citizen science tools. 鈥淯nderstanding post-disaster social impacts and responses is one of the most challenging aspects of reconnaissance. The RAPID facility will provide unprecedented resources to innovate workflows and tools for systematic collection of qualitative and quantitative data for social scientists,鈥� Miles said.

In addition to supporting researchers, the facility will enable citizens to use social media and mobile devices to crowdsource post-disaster data and build awareness about wind- and earthquake-related impacts.

The new center includes an interdisciplinary faculty team: 聽 91探花civil and environmental engineering professor will focus on structural and engineering analyses, Applied Physics Laboratory research scientist will lead software development, and Evans School of Public Policy professor will focus on data collection methods for social science.

The center builds on 91探花faculty expertise with post-disaster data collection and analysis. Wartman to collect data and document conditions following the 2014 Oso Landslide, the deadliest landslide in the history of the United States. Miles has conducted multiple socio-economic reconnaissance efforts, including an NSF-funded project to understand how businesses were impacted by Hurricane Isaac. Berman鈥檚 current work includes NSF-funded research projects to develop seismic load-resisting systems and to on the Pacific Northwest.

The grant follows NSF鈥檚 $40 million , announced in September 2015, which funds a network of shared research centers and resources at various universities across the nation. The goal is to reduce the vulnerability of buildings, tunnels, waterways, communication networks, energy systems and social groups in order to increase the disaster resilience of communities across the United States.

“Under NHERI, future discoveries will not only mitigate the impacts of earthquakes, but also will advance our ability to protect life and property from windstorms such as hurricanes and tornadoes,” said Joy Paushke, program director in NSF’s Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation.

For more information about the RAPID Facility, contact Wartman at wartman@uw.edu or 206-685-4806. For more information about today’s NSF announcement, .