AI Startups Promise to Help Disaster Relief and Evacuation

As record wildfires raced through California’s wine country last October, devouring thousands of homes, Sonoma County Sheriff’s deputies drove up and down streets with sirens blaring, warning residents over bullhorns to evacuate. Twenty-four people didn’t make it, and more than half of them were at least 70 years old. That suggests they either couldn’t hear the warnings or couldn’t leave under their own power, according to Sarah Tuneberg. “Those people did not need to die,” she says.

Tuneberg’s company, Geospiza Inc., sells artificial intelligence software that scours data to help cities find and protect their most vulnerable residents during a disaster. She says the platform can check multiple databases to guess which residents, in this case, have hearing impairments or use personal-care attendants. It then alerts emergency managers about who’s likely to need assistance. “It’s just too hard in the fog of war, given our current technology, to pull those pieces together in a timely fashion,” Tuneberg says. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”