Automating natural disaster impact analysis: An open resource to visually estimate a hurricane's impact on the electric grid

An ORNL team working on the Energy Awareness and Resiliency Standardized Services (EARSS) project developed a fully automated procedure to take wind speed and location estimates provided by hurricane forecasters and provide a geospatial estimate on the impact to the electric grid in terms of outage areas and projected duration of outages. Hurricane Sandy was one of the worst US storms ever, with reported injuries and deaths, millions of people without power for several days, and billions of dollars in economic impact. Hurricane advisories were released for Sandy from October 22 through 31, 2012. The fact that the geoprocessing was automated was significant - there were 64 advisories for Sandy. Manual analysis typically takes about one hour for each advisory. During a storm event, advisories are released every two to three hours around the clock, and an analyst capable of performing the manual analysis has other tasks they would like to focus on. Initial predictions of a big impact and landfall usually occur three days in advance, so time is of the essence to prepare for utility repair. Automated processing developed at ORNL allowed this analysis to be completed and made publicly available within minutes of each new advisory being released.