Dewberry, a privately held professional services firm, has announced that under New Light Technology’s contract with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Response Geospatial Office (RGO), it provided geospatial damage assessments in response to the tornadoes that impacted Kentucky and other Midwest states, and the wildfires in Boulder, Colorado.
In Kentucky, Dewberry used imagery provided by the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB) Geospatial Insurance Consortium (GIC) to run a machine learning model that identified properties damaged by the tornadoes. Damages were identified using FEMA’s classification system of affected damage, minor damage, major damage, or destroyed. Additionally, the firm supported FEMA and Civil Air Patrol teams conducting visual damage assessments using the NICB imagery. Dewberry entered the results of these damage assessments into a debris estimation model to help understand the amount of debris generated by the event and potential cost of removal.
In Colorado, Dewberry used post-event imagery from the NICB to assess damage to properties inside and near the fire perimeter, which was used to complete the visual assessments.
“These efforts will be used to help identify temporary housing locations for disaster survivors and expedite assistance following these devastating natural disaster events,” says Dewberry Senior Project Manager and Associate Vice President Catherine Bohn, GISP.
