Case Study: Atkins achieves rapid structural-damage prediction and tens of millions in savings with Alteryx

Atkins - Customer Case Study

Atkins, working as a contractor to FEMA after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, faced the impossible task of inspecting every building in Special Flood Hazard Areas to determine whether structures were more than 50% damaged. Traditional on-site inspections (two to three people per structure) would have taken years, so Atkins needed a rapid way to estimate damage, prioritize inspections, and focus scarce field resources by blending many disparate GIS and tabular data sources.

Using Alteryx, Atkins cleansed and merged over a dozen datasets (from NOAA, the National Weather Service, FEMA, the Army Corps, the EU and others) and built a Boosted Regression Decision Tree model supported by coordinated GIS, field-data and analytics teams. The approach evaluated about 146,000 structures, reduced required in-person inspections to roughly 30,000 (≈21%), saved tens of millions of dollars and years of recovery time, and helped more than 100,000 people begin reconstruction faster — while revealing key and unexpected drivers of damage.

Atkins

Michael DePue

Vice President