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Citizens of Chennai, is your area flooded due to rain? Report it on RiskMap — https://in.riskmap.org/ — a social media platform that harnesses the power of citizen reporting and social media to map time-critical information. With the meteorological department predicting heavy rainfall in the city and its adjoining areas over the next couple of days, due to a cyclonic circulation over southeast Bay of Bengal, the map could help the public access timely help and direct government relief agencies to act swiftly.
The platform gathers confirmed flood reports from social media and messaging platforms and directs them to a publicly available map to provide information in real-time. It plans to feed the crowd-sourced data to the emergency management department of Chennai Municipal corporation through a custom-built risk evaluation dashboard, according to information on the RiskMap website.
Overnight rains batter Chennai, causes waterlogging in many parts
The platform currently works with Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram, and visualises real-time sensor information such as the changing water levels in flood gauges, wells and pumping stations.
The map is already seeing many users. A citizen in the city’s Choolai area, for instance, has posted, “flooded since 3 days. No electricity since 3 days, no water”. Another in West Mambalam says, “hip height water stagnates”. A resident of Ashok Nagar said, “19th Avenue is under water since Sunday (Nov 7)”.
Mapping vulnerable cities
RiskMap India is a part of RiskMap.org — a project initiated by the Urban Risk Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a free, transparent platform for collective disaster management. In India, it is supported by the TATA Center for Technology and Design at MIT, and is focused on urban hazards and vulnerability of Indian cities. The partners are CAG, Chennai, Resilient Chennai (100 RC Cities) and SEED India.
Slideshow | Chennai witnesses heavy rain
Currently, the Urban Risk Lab is active in three countries — India, Indonesia, and the US — with the platform connecting residents, who often have the best localised information, with emergency managers to cut down response times. Through the live map, residents can also inform each other about the dynamically changing situation in the city and navigate to safety.
The platform was widely shared and used during a high-intensity rainfall event in Jakarta on February 21, 2017, helping over 300,000 residents navigate the flooded city. The public map was also embedded in the Uber app to help drivers travel safely through the city.
Similarly, in Chennai, during a high-intensity single-day rainfall event on November 2, 2017, the Riskmap.in website received 1,152 page views a minute at its peak and 1,11,808 page views in 24 hours, Urban Risk Lab said in its website.
Weather blogger Pradeep John (Tamil Nadu Weatherman), in a tweet, urged citizens to report data, as it could prove useful in designing solutions in the future and identifying flood hotspots.
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