RAPID: Investigating Illegal Dumping During the Course of Debris Collection Operations Following Hurricane Ian

Hurricane Ian made landfall as a catastrophic Category 4 hurricane on September 28, 2022, in the southwestern region of Florida. It generated substantial amounts of debris, exceeding the capacity of local waste management systems. Delayed collection of debris from public property and rights-of-way incurs public health and safety concerns. Since affected communities use their own limited resources for debris removal before the reimbursement by FEMA, it is critical to accurately estimate and keep track of the uncollected debris throughout recovery. While various tools are available to estimate the initial amount of disaster debris, current approaches do not update the estimates as a debris collection process proceeds over time. Further, illegal dumping - the disposal of ineligible debris at public sites without legal permission - often causes such initial estimates to become obsolete and complicates debris logistics planning and reimbursement management. This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project aims to collect ephemeral data on uncollected debris on public roadways during the course of debris collection operations in order to investigate illegal debris disposal and its social and environmental impacts. This project will (i) conduct a sequential survey of affected public roadways with unmanned aerial vehicles and a LiDAR scanner to capture the amount of illegally dumped waste over time, (ii) link illegally dumped debris to its relevant collection trajectories through collaboration with debris contractors, and (iii) perform online surveys to understand the social and environmental impacts of uncollected debris, debris disposal methods, and community settings. The volume of debris at different points in time will be quantified through machine learning algorithms with aerial imagery and 3-D point cloud data resulting from the sequential survey. The volume of illegally disposed debris on each roadway section will then be estimated by comparing the debris volumes at subsequent times along with the volume of debris collected by haulers over the elapsed time. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.