On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico as a first Category 4 storm.  With sustained winds of 155 miles per hour and three times the rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Maria decimated Puerto Rico’s infrastructure, putting 3.1 million people without power or access to clean water.   In this Rapid Research (RAPID) project, we developed and advanced open-source software infrastructure to support scientific investigation and data-driven decision-making following natural disasters like Hurricane Maria, with a pilot project focused on drinking water.  We focused on capturing different types of information that may inform the health conditions of regional populations, specific to geographic bounds of the island of Puerto Rico up to six months after Hurricane Maria (September 2017 – February 2018). We coordinated and collaboratively sampled, processed, and archived drinking water quality from six rural community water systems in southeast Puerto Rico. We archived physical public infrastructure and storm damage conditions, regional census-based population estimates and geography, and qualitative survey information about population health researcher needs.  A two-part Collaborative RAPID Digital Infrastructure Design workshop was held in 1) San Juan Puerto Rico with government, academic, and public utility hurricane data stakeholders, and 2) rural community water system data stakeholders in a southeastern municipality in Puerto Rico. Widespread disruption of drinking water distribution systems in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria posed a significant risk to human health. We used our preliminary workshop findings to design a qualitative study on the needs and barriers of population health researchers when using geospatial and other datasets in hurricane disaster research.  We then used information from workshops and the qualitative interviews to design scientific cyberinfrastructure that integrates existing hardware and software platforms to strategically archive and disseminate water resources data relevant to public health and environmental concerns. Cyberinfrastructure was used to integrate heterogeneous datasets (e.g., water quality, geospatial surveys, human health information) and provide a unique resource for examining how natural-human coupled systems respond to extreme events.

Intellectual Merit: Our first objective was to assess the presence of waterborne pathogens in public water systems impacted by a major hurricane and with varying access to electricity. A  drinking water sampling campaign has been developed to quantify microbial contamination in municipal drinking water systems. In collaboration with researchers in Puerto Rico, we targeted buy-in from six community systems, one municipal utility, and a surface water stream system, to provide a cross-section of systems that are operational (e.g., providing water service with partial to full water treatment capabilities).  This data is now available with public and private versions to protect sensitive communities and to follow Institutional Review Board (IRB) guidelines. The second objective was to demonstrate usability of HydroShare as a clearinghouse to centralize selected datasets related to disaster response. We assembled baseline (before hurricane) and hurricane recovery data for Puerto Rico. The heterogeneous datasets from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria contribute crucial information about geospatial factors and population health trends in the wake of mass resource and infrastructure loss.  Our final objective was to develop a prototype cyberinfrastructure to assess conditions of environmental resources (including drinking water quality and landscape conditions) and population health impacted by natural disasters like Hurricane Maria. We have adapted existing cyberinfrastructure components to foster streamlined disaster preparedness, recovery, and population health research (see images).

Broader impacts: This research deepens our understanding of the impact of extreme events, which could inform recovery efforts in Puerto Rico and strengthen emergency preparedness protocols and self-resiliency in other communities subject to hurricane flooding.  In partnership with the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc., data collected in this project was reported in a consistent, documented format and broadly accessible to the research community. We developed a unique multi-institutional collaboration to leverage expertise and knowledge from a hurricane impacted community (Puerto Rico) and across the continental United States. Our work generated a comprehensive archive and template for using advanced cyberinfrastructure and CyberTraining to share hurricane information for both academic research and building resilient community digital and physical infrastructure.  Beyond cyberinfrastructure advancements, drinking water sampling data have used by our project team to assess potential contamination. The workflow and prototype tools we developed for sharing the Puerto Rico drinking water data are generic and serve more broadly as an example of how this type of data can be managed and subsequently shared in an open system like HydroShare. Members of the scientific community can now use these same capabilities within HydroShare when building new data collections.

Enter our public gateway from CUAHSI here.

See our ArcGIS Online story map here.

Access our Hydroshare resource collection here.

Join the public HydroShare Puerto Rico Water Studies Group here.

Last Modified: 04/01/2019
Modified by: Christina Bandaragoda