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Kansas City, Missouri's, Office of Emergency Management is working with Google X's Bellwether to prepare for future natural disasters by testing how artificial intelligence (AI) can strengthen emergency response.
Google is paying for the project.
Kansas City is the first city to use new AI technologies to better understand how to respond quickly and effectively when a disaster occurs.
The project's goal is to provide quick, street-level evaluations of residential structures and support first responders in identifying community impacts and safety concerns.
"The city is flying their own drones, they’ll capture images of homes and then we access those images to see how much damage was done," Bellwether Program Manager Joshua Jeffrey said.
The exercise focused on using AI-driven mapping and analysis to identify building damage in seconds instead of days. Using drone technology, teams worked through a simulation on how to respond to homes impacted by severe weather.
"What it does is go through its collective memory of damage it's seen before or its understanding of classification of levels of damage as specified by FEMA," Jeffrey said.
Eventually, researchers want to use this technology to predict severe weather before it happens.
"Versus always being caught like a deer in the headlights," Kansas City Chief Digital Officer Andrew Ngui said. "That’s really the heart of it."
The hope is once the project has gathered enough information from their work in Kansas City, they will be able to share what they learned with other cities.
"Can we help cities and people be more resilient?," Jeffrey asked. "Which means, if we know something's coming, can they build their infrastructure better to prepare for a very severe event?"
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