Disaster Tech's DICE Platform Tackles Disasters with Technology

 Disaster Tech is a veteran-owned organization that provides people with advanced disaster preparedness, response, and resilience tools through the use of technology. The tech company gives people the opportunity to plan, train, and prepare ahead of unforeseen disasters that might occur in the future using their Decision Sciences Integrated Collaboration Environment (DICE).

DICE is a situational awareness platform that can take in data, situation models, and texts, process them into comprehensive information, and share them across various teams involved in the crisis management. Disaster Tech designed the platform to provide its users with real-time information, which helps them make the right decisions before, during, and after the crisis.

One of the features of the DICE platform is the event monitor, which allows users of DICE to combine hazards and threat data to figure out which critical assets are at risk. The event monitor issues an automatic alert to users via text, email, and other communication platforms when an asset is being threatened, and also provides information on what form of threat the asset is facing. Additionally, DICE’s event monitor also recommends possible protective actions to users in order to minimize risk, and gives responders time to prepare for protective actions.

The Mission Manager is another feature of DICE, and it helps users of the platform coordinate and manage their various tasks in a way that improves their chances of success. This feature also allows users of the DICE platform to have a full view of how resources and tasks are being managed and coordinated before, during, and after a crisis. Also, since information is vital to managing emergency situations, the built-in notification capability of the DICE platform allows users to text and share emails with other members of their team as the situation unfolds, ensuring that every team member stays updated throughout the crisis.

Since Disaster Tech built the DICE platform, they’ve tested it in real-world situations a number of times, including in 2020, when the Red Cross reached out to Disaster Tech following the Camp Fire in Butte County, California, in 2018, the most destructive wildfire in California’s history. The Red Cross tasked Disaster Tech to prove that they had a system that could track the rebuilding process of the structures that the fire had destroyed.

Using the DICE platform, Disaster Tech gathered data which showed that many of the affected individuals hadn’t rebuilt their destroyed properties, and the wildfire had left thousands displaced. The DICE platform produced this result in a fraction of the time that other manual processes would have taken, and it also cost significantly less.

Also, Disaster Tech teamed up with utility industry partners to collect data from Hurricane Barry, which made a category one landfall in Louisiana in July 2019. Disaster Tech then utilized the data gathered from the hurricane to create a model through which the DICE platform could predict areas that were most likely to experience power outages at the parish level.

The predictive model consisted of data from three days before the hurricane began, the landfall day, and three days after the hurricane’s landfall. From the visualizations of the data on the DICE platform, Disaster Tech concluded that the model they designed predicted the areas that experienced power outages because of the hurricane with a high degree of accuracy. Disaster Tech also added live traffic data alongside available housing into its model in order to provide work crews and technicians with the best routes to access the areas experiencing the power outages.