Charleston County is collaborating with Georgia Tech’s Partnership for Inclusive Innovation on a project to use artificial intelligence to help emergency management officials prepare for the next big flood.
By using historic information from previous storms and flooding events along with real-time data sources (like flooding viewed from traffic cameras), the model will predict road impacts across the region. The project aims to help county leadership position and maneuver emergency medical services, fire rescue teams and police dispatches before and during a severe weather event.
“When we’re expecting severe weather … we kind of preplan the position of units based off human memory of what streets flood,” said Kim Winn, deputy chief of operations for the county’s emergency medical services. “This plan will move it towards a more scientific way of that preplanning versus just my memory from 10 years ago and how many times the street floods.”
The first few months of the project, through March 2025, will be funded by a $10,000 grant, according to the County Council agenda item. The full pilot will last a year, with the first quarter dedicated to compiling data and analyzing current EMS procedures. The second and third quarter will be devoted to developing the model.
John Taylor, the Georgia Tech researcher overseeing the project, wrote in an email that the algorithm will be deployed during the final quarter, just in time for the peak of the 2025 hurricane season.
“The resulting application and algorithm will be able to be generalized to other cities, but will have the greatest impact in coastal communities where flooding is more challenging due to a combination of heavy rains/tropical storm and tidal water levels,” Taylor wrote. The partnership will include Chatham County, Ga. The greater Savannah area is another region of the Southeast that’s becoming increasingly vulnerable to high-tide flooding and severe storms.
Taylor wrote that the algorithm will provide guidance for emergency response officials, and it won’t automate any services. It will still be a person who makes the final call on deployment strategies.
“It’s giving our public safety agencies the tool to make an informed decision,” said Shawn Smetana, Charleston County’s director of innovation. Smetana added that the model will cover multiple types of flooding, including tidal and stormwater.
Emergency management officials likely will need all the tools they can get in coming years as South Carolina enters a new era of storms influenced by global warming. Fueled by record-warm ocean temperatures, tropical systems are getting wetter, and research has shown that they now carry the energy to grow from minor to major in a shorter amount of time.
Meanwhile, tropical cyclones are simultaneously moving faster and slower. Internal wind speeds are picking up, but the forward momentum of storms generally is slowing down. Three storms in the past decade — August’s Tropical Storm Debby, 2018’s Hurricane Florence and the “thousand-year storm” of 2015 — have slowed to a virtual crawl over the Carolinas, dropping enormous amounts of rain.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that slowing storm speed hasn’t been definitively linked to climate change, but the federal agency notes its becoming increasingly common. Ocean levels in the Charleston area are predicted to rise roughly a foot over the next 25 years.
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