How A Custom Microsoft App Is Helping The Caribbean Rebuild After Hurricanes

Workers collect data using the Microsoft Building Damage Assessment application in Barbuda. The island was home to 1,600 people, all of whom were evacuated after Hurricane Irma. (Photo from the United Nations Development Program)

CODRINGTON, Barbuda - Last month at a United Nations donor conference, the international community pledged $ 1.3 billion to rebuild the Caribbean devastated by the hurricanes. But how did they know how much the region needs to recover, which suffered consecutive category 5 hurricanes in September? In part, thanks to a new application and software package from Microsoft, developed in collaboration with relief workers in the United States.

The application prosamente called Building Damage Assessment turned out to be a vital factor in the evaluation of the devastation of Barbuda and Dominica, two islands that faced all the force of the hurricanes Irma and Maria, respectively. Optimized for tablets, the Building Damage Assessment allows volunteers in the field with minimal training to quickly enter data on structural damage through a series of drop-down questions, and collect photographs for visual evidence. The data is stored offline and then loaded through the cloud when the tablet reappears in mobile data or wi-fi range. Professionals, on the other hand, can analyze data using Microsoft Power BI to tabulate the total amount of damage and detect trends, such as certain types of building materials that are more likely to collapse.

The results have impressed even veteran professionals after a disaster such as Ugo Blanco, of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). "It's going to change the way the evaluations were done," he said. "It can be implemented at any time and anywhere, in a few days, we can have teams in any country in the world."

Microsoft developed a beta iteration of Building Damage Assessment in 2015 as part of its humanitarian responses to earthquakes in Nepal, but the software was not strengthened until the double-hit of this year's hurricanes, when UNDP again requested technical assistance. assistance. The software giant assigned ten employees to the project and donated 70 Microsoft Surface tablets, as well as keyboards and digital pens for use in the field, part of a post-hurricane philanthropic contribution of $ 6.3 million.

Unlike a traditional software project, the client, the United Nations, needed the final product as soon as possible. "With people suffering, moving fast was really important, and we felt that the time it took for the normal development of the application would not work in this situation," Microsoft humanitarian response manager Cameron Birge said in an e-mail. . "Given the need for UNDP to deploy quickly, this meant that the team had to respond and react more quickly, as challenges arose in the collection of information and the UX."

One month after the storms, the damage assessment to the building was ready. Barbuda is home to 1,600 people, all of whom were evacuated after Hurricane Irma. At the beginning of November, its 1,250 structures became the first complete assessment on a hurricane-hit island. Only a few United Nations relief workers were on the ground, so the US personnel. UU He recruited local volunteers and placed them in 12 teams that were deployed in Codrington, the only settlement in Barbuda.

Each team included a volunteer trained in the Building Damage Assessment application, an architect or construction engineer who could assess the damage, and a location that knew the neighborhood and its residents. In 10-15 minutes, the team will determine the state of the building and collect as much information as possible about the inhabitants (family size, sex, age, occupation) in a series of 46 questions.

Adradene Walker was one of the volunteers who ran a tablet. After a one-hour orientation workshop, they sent her to the field and said that working with the new application was very easy.

"Everything was simple," he told me. "It was even easier than some online forms." Walker has some experience in entering data from her job as a secretary at Barbuda High School. She owns a smartphone and an HP 3-in-1 laptop. With drop-down menus, the application is designed to be easy to use for anyone with mobile technology knowledge.

In five days, the teams evaluated all the buildings in Barbuda in time for the donor conference at UN headquarters. While initial reports immediately following the storm indicated that 90% of the buildings in Barbuda were damaged, the Building Damage Assessment determined that approximately half of the structures are ready to be re-installed or require relatively minor repairs. The other half needs serious repairs or has to be rebuilt from scratch. That kind of information helped the UN determine the approximate cost of $ 79 million to repair and rebuild the houses in Barbuda, the kind of difficult number needed for a pledging conference to yield valuable results. 70-243 VCE

The use of technology in post-disaster scenarios is not without difficulties, of course, especially due to power outages. Generators continue to rule life in Barbuda, and nearby Antigua, 62 kilometers away, offered a stable place to return at the end of the day with reliable electricity and the Internet. (Antigua and Barbuda is a country of twin islands). Dominica has proven to be a more daunting task. There are 25,000 structures to be evaluated by 30 teams. UNDP estimates that it will take two months to finish work there. As power is slowly restored, police stations are the only reliable source of electricity in remote areas. The tablets must also withstand difficult conditions, some overheated in the sun of Barbuda, so cases are de rigueur.

Fortunately, Microsoft Surface Pro 3 can work offline and still collect GPS coordinates. With mobile roaming data, the application can load 30 questionnaires in ten seconds to collect the most important data, while the photos can be retained until there is a WiFi connection.

As the tool continues its work in Dominica, UNDP and Microsoft are already discussing future improvements to the user experience, such as further rationalization of the questionnaire to minimize keyboard entries, which are prone to errors in the high-field environment. Pressure.

The desktop data analysis of the tool also helped develop local capacity in an underdeveloped region. "The Building Damage Assessment gave us information that the government had never had before," Blanco said, citing detailed information from more than millions of data on the location of the damaged buildings, the type of debris and what types of roofs were more prone. failure. He describes the user-friendly visual display as valuable to technicians in a housing ministry but also easy to understand for a prime minister or president.

"This information is critical evidence," Blanco said. "You can make political decisions about how to rebuild."

Above all, the Construction Damage Assessment has shown that a digital approach is the future of disaster relief. "I've been in many situations after a disaster, at best, we've had information we can not use: thousands of pages that we did not have time to enter or enter Excel," Blanco said. "We are dealing with millions of data points, you can not do that with paper."