Experts from the National Weather Service, Texas Task Force 1, the Texas A&M Forest Service, the National Guard, American Red Cross, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, emergency management, and the insurance industry will spend June 3-4, 2014, with Texas A&M researchers and partner industries to create a roadmap for using information technology to prevent, prepare, respond, and recover from all types of flooding.
"Flooding is costing the U.S. over 80 lives and $8 billion in damages each year, and those numbers don’t include storm surge from hurricanes," said Dr. Robin Murphy, director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. "Texas is especially vulnerable and the Texas A&M System has the right mix of engineering, social science, and geospatial researchers along with industry partners to make a difference."
The resulting roadmap will identify existing technologies that can be used immediately by agencies and citizens and prioritize additional research and development needs.
The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station’s Center for Emergency Informatics (CEI) is hosting the Summer Institute at Disaster City®. The Summer Institute combines invited talks with hands-on demonstrations and a mini-exercise. Faculty and industry participants will show off innovations in wireless technologies, multi-touch devices, unmanned marine vehicles, and computer simulations, along with unmanned aerial vehicles and 3D reconstruction software used at the Washington state SR350 mudslide.
About the Center for Emergency Informatics (CEI): CEI serves to connect members of the Texas A&M family such as the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX); TEES Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue; Hazards Reduction and Recovery Center; Institute for Science, Technology and Public Policy; Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center; and the TEEX Product Development Center. It includes Emergency Informatics EDGE® Innovation Center, which is the nucleus for the 300-plus member industry consortium led by General Dynamics. The CEI holds Summer and Winter Institutes to facilitate research and development and accelerate technology adoption. This will be the sixth Summer Institute. Previous institutes have been on chemical and radiological hazards, terrorism, and urban search and rescue.