Identifying Vulnerable Healthcare Facilities Due to Effects of Precipitation

Climate change can have a prominent effect on the health care facilities vulnerability to get negatively impacted. Environmental factors such as extreme precipitation pose increased flood risk, thereby increasing the vulnerability of health care facilities in these areas. In this poster, we explore the effect of extreme monthly averaged precipitation on the risk of healthcare facilities from the years 2010 to 2020 by leveraging data from 2005 to 2020. We applied KMeans, DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise), and Agglomerative clustering to identify the top areas of extreme vulnerability. Healthcare facilities are the most important part of our society, as they are the backbone on which the whole system is based. As witnessed by the recent snowstorm and the subsequent power outages in Texas (February 2021), damages to these facilities can result in loss of human lives and a disruption of the community. These facilities can be most disrupted and brought to a halt by being flooded. A very recent example for this is the flooding that happened in Massachusetts where heavy rainfall triggered a flash flood emergency in the area and dozens of patients had to be transported to different hospitals because of the hospital becoming unable to function. This project aims to identify and reduce the severity of these events by assigning hospitals and other healthcare facilities with a risk factor, so that the hospitals can assess their vulnerability to the aforementioned events and take necessary precautions. This poster was presented at the 2021 Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP) Summer Meeting held virtually in July 2021.