Hurricane Helene, one of the most intense Atlantic storms ever recorded, devastated areas from the Gulf coast of Florida to North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains. With winds reaching 150 mph and torrential rainfall, the Category 5 storm caused widespread power outages, severe flooding, massive landslides, and damage to homes, infrastructure, and local economies. As the disaster unfolded in the Blue Ridge mountains, it became clear that the knowledge, skills, and resources of long-term residents were playing a critical role in the emergency response.
No one understood the communities and terrain like the locals who have lived there for generations. Long time residents knew which rivers and streams were rising the fastest, which bridges and roads were washed away, and how to navigate alterative paths. They used their chainsaws, trucks, and tractors to clear fallen trees from driveways and roads. They hiked into inaccessible areas, provided situational updates, and helped carry in relief supplies. They knew who was missing, stranded, or in need, and they shared this information through word of mouth, social media, and local networks to direct help where it was most needed.
The efforts of the public during the crisis highlights an opportunity to enhance public health responses to disasters by integrating community insights in real-time. While federal and state agencies rely on sophisticated systems to collect and share disaster data, these systems often fall short in capturing real-time, crowdsourced information. Advances in cloud computing and data science now make it possible to leverage data on smart phones, wearables, and social media forms to gain immediate insights from communities on topics like evolving hazards, infrastructure damage, displacement patterns, and health and safety issues.
The time to realize the opportunity for enhanced disaster response is now. In 2024 alone, the U.S has experienced two dozen disasters with economic losses exceeding $1 billion, and in coming decades, more severe events are expected due to climate change. What is needed is a system that is inclusive, agile, fast, and targeted—a system that transforms community insights into actionable intelligence.
A New Insight Engine to Enhance Disaster Response
ICA’s RealWorld Insights Engine is a state-of-the-art platform that makes it possible for public health officials to act faster by enabling them to quickly gather, integrate, and analyze multi-modal data generated by communities in real-time. The platform automates arduous tasks across the data management lifecycle by applying natural language processing, machine learning models, and leading-edge web services to clean, aggregate, and harmonize data. Moreover, the platform democratizes the analysis process with no-code/low code tools, allowing a broader user base to interact with data and uncover actionable insights by visualizing patterns and trends, hunching hypotheses, and even forecasting future scenarios.
The RealWorld Insights Engine has unique features that rapidly bring new data and tools to enhance disaster response:
- Unlocking Community-Generated Data: Communities who experience disasters often turn to social media to share information and learn from others. They post messages, pictures, and videos in real time that speak to emerging hazards, ongoing challenges, unmet needs, and much more. Other sources of data, such as wearables to track displacement, remain untapped. By extracting these disparate data sources in real time using the Insight Engine, public health officials can gain new sources of information for rapid decision making and targeted action.
- Democratizing Data Analysis. The evolving challenges surrounding disasters require ongoing analysis to inform decision making, yet traditional analytical tools are out of reach for many stakeholders. The RealWorld Insight Engine overcomes this challenge with no-code/low-code analysis features that enable a broader base of users to create maps, figures, and tables to address emerging information needs.
- Fostering Collaboration and Inclusivity Shared workspaces and version control features ensure that public health responders can collaborate on the same datasets and dashboards in real time and share them with community stakeholders. This functionality supports multi-agency coordination and ensures that critical information is accessible to everyone involved.
- Ground-truthing to Address Community Concerns: Misinformation often arises following disasters, in part because of inherent difficulties gathering information from a broad array of community stakeholders, relief groups, and government agencies. The RealWorld Insight engine allows everyone’s stories to be collected, aggregated, and shared quickly so that emerging misinformation can be dispelled quickly, thereby maintaining focus on critical issues.
Uniting People, Data, and Technology to Build Disaster Resiliency
The increasing frequency of natural disasters demands a new approach that unites people, data and technology to mitigate lasting negative impacts on communities. The RealWorld Insights Engine opens a new frontier in disaster response by enabling more comprehensive, real-time views on emerging challenges faced by affected communities. By democratizing access to powerful tools and diverse data, the platform ensures that a wide range of stakeholders—from first responders to relief workers to public health officials—can contribute to a coordinated, effective response.
“This approach shifts disaster response from reactive to proactive. By leveraging real-time data and insights, public health officials can anticipate emerging threats, mitigate risks, and reduce the long-term consequences for communities. For government agencies, local responders, and other stakeholders, the RealWorld Insights Engine provides a pathway to greater resilience: one that is inclusive, data-driven, and focused on what matters most during times of crisis.”