Background

Hurricane Beryl was the earliest recorded Category 4 and Category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record. As the first major hurricane of the 2024 season, Beryl made landfall as a Category 4 Hurricane on July 1 in Grenada and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the eastern Caribbean. It intensified to a Category 5 as it made its way to Jamaica and Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, and made final landfall in Texas on July 8th, where it left between 2-3 million people without power.  ​

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Extreme events such as Hurricane Beryl exert both direct and indirect effects on population health and well-being. Direct effects are often characterized by morbidity and mortality directly attributable to exposure to the extreme event, such as injuries sustained by direct contact with the forces of the extreme event. As of early August 2024, sixty-four hurricane-related deaths were confirmed across the regions exposed to Beryl, including thirty-nine deaths in the US, six in Grenada, four in Jamaica, and eight in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Public officials cited a mix of causes for these initial deaths: individuals struck by falling trees, those who succumbed to drowning, others whose essential medical devices failed due to lack of power, and individuals who were killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from improperly vented generators. The indirect effects of the storm, however, are expected to lead to substantially more death, trauma, and illness over time. Among the factors contributing to such indirect effects are, (1) health system disruptions in access to and continuity of care; (2) supply chain interruptions in medical supplies and pharmaceuticals; (3) displacement, evacuation, or relocation of populations or sub-groups; and (4) stresses secondary to the loss of physical, economic, social, and psychological assets and resources. The academic field of public health disaster science and the practice field of Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response (PHEPR) share a common interest in rapidly estimating these indirect effects using both primary and secondary data sources, and in developing interventions that mitigate their impact or prevent their occurrence. There is a compelling interest among practitioners and researchers for readily accessible, representative, and generalizable data that can serve as “distant early warning” signals of such indirect effects. One possible source of such data is Location-Based Data (LBD), including mobile phone data, social media and internet-based location data, and satellite data.

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In response to Hurricane Beryl, the Public Health Extreme Events Research network (PHEER) established a Health Impacts Task Force to identify unique and innovative uses of Location-Based Data (LBD) for estimating the indirect effects of a hurricane on the health and well-being of an exposed population. PHEER will fund up to five Rapid Research Awards, each totaling $5,000 in total costs, to identify innovative data sources and conduct analyses. The awards will be made to PHEER members within six weeks of the release of the request for proposals, and successful awardees will be invited to participate in a “Work-in-Progress Workshop” in December 2024, as well as present their work in one or two PHEER webinars for stakeholder groups affected by the hurricane and for the public health disaster research community in early 2025. Funding for these rapid awards has been made available to PHEER by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, through an Interagency Agreement with the National Science Foundation. The final application guidance will be released on August 12, 2024.