Hurricane Sandy

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Open Source Resources for major Disaster & Emergency Management Situations

By Peter Groen | October 30, 2012

As everyone knows by now, the superstorm known as 'Hurricane Sandy' has caused considerable devastation across the East Coast of the United States and all the way up to the Great Lakes region. The effects of the storm will continue to be felt for days and weeks as major portions of the East Coast are without electricity and flooding is expected to continue for days. Under these circumstances, it seemed appropriate to put together a listing of open source applications that have been successfully used in emergencies and disaster recovery all over the world. In times of man-made crises or natural disasters, there is a range of organizations, websites, open source tools, mobile apps, and more that might be of use to first responders and citizens in general. Check out some of the following resources...

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Public Health Threats Emerging in Houston in the Aftermath of Hurricane Harvey

By Julie M. Smyth | September 22, 2017

Although Hurricane Harvey's floodwaters have largely receded, public health threats are emerging over polluted floodwater and contaminated drinking water. Chemical pollution from damaged industrial sites, flooded toxic waste site, and contamination by infection-causing bacteria have been the main causes of concern. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warned residents and cleanup workers who might be exposed to floodwaters to take precautions due to hazards such as dangerous debris, bacteria, and other contaminants. This article will review some of those public health threats.

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Sandy Aid Website Doesn’t Live Up To Stimulus-Tracking Standards

Charles S. Clark | Government Executive | November 1, 2013

On the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy Oct. 29, members of the Obama administration’s special interagency task force were eager to placate the homeowners and business people growing impatient with the pace of arriving grants and contracts for rebuilding. Read More »

The Government’s Hurricane Sandy Pages Play By Play

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | June 4, 2013

With its satellites, scanners and links to local officials, the federal government is often the best source for trusted information during a hurricane, tornado or other natural disaster. Read More »

The Really Big One

Kathryn Schulz | The New Yorker | July 20, 2016

An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest. The question is when. Most people in the United States know just one fault line by name: the San Andreas, which runs nearly the length of California and is perpetually rumored to be on the verge of unleashing “the big one.” That rumor is misleading, no matter what the San Andreas ever does...Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland...

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The State Of HIE As 2012 Comes To A Close

Anthony Brino | Government Health IT | December 21, 2012

Although medical professionals may have been using the phrase "health information exchange" for centuries, the health information sharing organizational arrangement used today was first mentioned in the popular media by the Canadian Press in 1977, according to Google's archives, when Canadian health officials agreed to set up an inter-provincial HIE for studying coronary bypass surgeries and occupational health trends. Read More »

When the United Nations Calls, MicroMappers Acts

By Patrick Meier | March 18, 2015

Open source and crowdsourcing—uttering these words at a meeting of the United Nations before the year 2010 would have made you persona non grata. In fact, the fastest way to discredit yourself at any humanitarian meeting just five years ago was to suggest the use of open source software and crowdsourcing in disaster response. Then, a tragic earthquake occured in Haiti in 2010, and OpenStreetMap and Ushahidi were deployed in the aftermath. Their use demonstrated the potential of free and open source crowdsourcing platforms in humanitarian contexts. Then, Typhoon Ruby in the Philippines occured five years later. What technology was used?...