Dawn: Improving Hurricane Response for Citizens and Local Governments

Weather-related disasters have the potential to cause devastating impact on community infrastructure, families, and lives. The current state of hurricane relief can be broken down into pre-hurricane preparation and post-hurricane recovery. However, many problems exist in both stages of overall hurricane relief from both the citizen and government perspective; these problems range from the ambiguous information experience of storm preparation, to slow repair protocols for infrastructure damage. In this paper we propose Dawn, a local weather information tool that improves the process of information retrieval and city-wide recovery from hurricanes for citizens and local governments. Dawn targets some of the key problems found in primary and secondary research regarding hurricane preparation and relief. The design provides local government Emergency Management Agencies (EMAs) with a drone swarm weather monitoring system to assess infrastructure damage costs on a large scale, and citizens with hyperlocal weather information based on their specific locations.