Over the past twenty years, most disaster after action reports end with a similar analysis.
Communication blackouts. No mutual aid coordination. Offline emergency management systems. Contradictory maps and routing. Lost data. No cross-jurisdictional support. Understaffed agencies. A confused public.
Disasters move quickly. When the systems designed to manage them can't keep up, everyone suffers.
In a single year, 3.3 million U.S. adults were displaced by natural disasters.² Communities are hit with disaster while recovering from a previous one.
FEMA expects the Disaster Relief Fund, the money that pays for federal disaster response, to run a major deficit.³
After Hurricane Helene, nonprofits applied for disaster assistance while operating in siloed systems with no shared situational awareness.
77% of survivors are targeted by potential scammers within the first thirty days after a disaster.¹
Because of fractured data collection and inadequate tools that don't communicate with each other, community responders experience needless burnout and discouragement. Yet, they power through obstacles to serve the public and recover from disaster. They show up, with paper binders. They try, with expensive software that fails under surge demand.
Helpers already respond to disasters. They just need coordination infrastructure.