Hurricane Florence as seen from the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)
Nearly 1.5 million people in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia are under orders to evacuate their homes as Hurricane Florence, now a Category 4 hurricane, barrels toward the Mid-Atlantic Coast. The arrival of Florence, which will make landfall on Thursday, Sept. 13, comes almost one year after Hurricane Maria pummeled the Caribbean, potentially causing the deaths of more than 1,400 people in Puerto Rico alone.
CU Boulder experts are available to discuss the impacts of hurricanes and other natural disasters on infrastructure and communities and the long-term toll of Hurricane Maria.
Leysia Palen, a computer science professor and founding chair of the Department of Information Science, studies how Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms influence response to natural disasters. She’s working with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to analyze 10 million tweets from the historic 2017 hurricane season, zeroing in on those containing risk forecast images, like the “cone of uncertainty.” The research suggests Twitter users are often confused by those images.
leysia.palen@colorado.edu or melissa.bica@colorado.edu
Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center and co-author of the FEMA book “Safer, Stronger, Smarter: A Guide to Improving School Natural Hazard Safety” can discuss the impact natural disasters have on children and what schools can do to be better prepared.
lori.peek@colorado.edu
Keith Porter, a research professor in Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, explores how efforts to shore up communities before disasters like hurricanes can save lives and money in the long run. “Hurricanes Maria and Florence can remind us that America currently suffers a large investment gap: we spend much less to avoid hurricane losses than we spend to recover from them,” Porter said.
keith.porter@colorado.edu
Fernando Rosario-Ortiz, an associate professor in Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, researches the impacts of natural disasters on water quality. He’s investigated how wildfires can contaminate drinking water sources and has studied the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.
fernando.rosario@colorado.edu
Contact:
Daniel Strain, CU Boulder media relations
daniel.strain@colorado.edu
303-735-5875