Traverse Analytics helps Indigenous communities, fire departments, municipalities, and corporations understand complex extreme weather event data through their digital literacy platform.
Their team has a combined 50+ years of firsthand experience on all sides of a disaster. The team has responded to complex disasters as “boots on the ground,” managed complex supply chain incidents (train derailments, pipeline ruptures, enterprise-wide business disruptions) fulfilling various functions at the incident command post and in emergency operations centers.
Members of their team have served as public servants, where they have worked with residents impacted by disaster, and witnessed the catastrophic impacts and community resilience. The CEO has worked with municipal, Indigenous, and industrial fire services for more than years, providing community risk assessments, risk mitigation strategies, forming strategic partnerships, overseeing suppression training evolutions, and teaching strategic fire management practices.
Traverse Analytics Inc. has identified an interconnected trifecta of growing gaps in the market, where indigenous communities do not have a way to collect and analyze relevant, timely community risk data, apply prescriptive analytics and forecast critical vulnerabilities in aging infrastructure to minimize threats and exposures against extreme weather events.
It’s through what has been witnessed during disasters, along with strong academic backgrounds, that pushed the team to this solution and passion to build a pre-disaster analytics hyper-scaled system and bring it to market.
A pre-disaster analytics mapping system (PDAMS) anticipates what will happen, when it will happen, and why by aggregating historical incident data, digitizing contents of a community risk assessment, incorporating and augmenting FireSmart data, applying predictive modelling, and prescribing enriched action.
This same gap was identified for municipalities and regional districts, who rely on aging infrastructure to deliver essential services such as drinking water, sewage collection and treatment, garbage collection and recycling, fire protection, cultural and recreational facilities, and transportation, as well as promote sustainable communities.
As such, for municipal, regional, and Indigenous communities alike, the value of employing a community led tool to predict extreme weather event impacts, identify vulnerabilities and prescribe risk mitigation action, will lead to enhanced, sustainable infrastructure in environmental, economic, and social dimensions and support future generations.
They say their mission is clear: To provide actionable insights that promote life safety, foster resilience, and advance sustainability. Through their pre-disaster analytics mapping system, they hope to achieve just that.
This article is part of Innovation+ in the Plus 15, a special editorial series from the Calgary Innovation Peer Forum and Digital Journal that explores how Calgary-based companies are innovating.
