Text extracted from Fast Company
The company debuted Flood Concern in late 2018. It creates map-based visualizations of where water surges may hit hardest, up to five days ahead of an impending storm. For cities, that includes not just time-lapse breakdowns of how the water will rise, how fast it could move, and what direction it will be flowing, but also what structures will get swamped or washed away, and how differing mitigation efforts – from levy building to dam releases – will impact each scenario. It’s the winner of Fast Company’s 2019 World Changing Ideas Awards in the AI and Data category.
One Concern’s first offering, dubbed Seismic Concern, takes existing information from satellite images and building permits to figure out what kind of ground structures are built on, and what might happen if they started shaking. If a big one hits, the program can extrapolate from the epicenter to suggest the likeliest places for destruction, and then adjust as more data from things like 911 calls and social media gets factored in.
Flood Concern works similarly, but with a more dynamic set of variables. It includes soil saturation and building stability estimates but also how topography will affect potential runoff. Then it adds in factors like National Weather Service forecasts and U.S. Geological Survey data about nearby river or tidal flows to create a model that adjusts as the situation changes. “We look at how things change over space and time,” says One Concern cofounder and CTO Nicole Hu.
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