InnovationEncouraging innovation for better preparedness, recovery, and resilience tools

Last week the White House hosted innovators in technology and emergency management to discuss new tools that can improve preparedness, recovery, and resilience in the wake of a disaster. The White House Innovation for Disaster Response and Recovery Initiative Demo Day showcased innovations from the private sector and government agencies aimed at aiding survivors of large-scale emergencies. The key goal was to “find the most efficient and effective ways to empower survivors to help themselves,” said U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park.

Emergency Managementreports that Airbnb, the sharing economy platform used to find apartments and homes for temporary use, has agreements with Portland and San Francisco officials to work with the cities before, during, and after an emergency to identify hosts who will house emergency workers and survivors, provide preparedness materials to hosts, provide emergency alerts to hosts and their guests about hazards, and provide community response training to hosts.

The Weather Company is building a localized alerting platform that emergency officials can use to alert residents about disasters.

From the public sector, the administration will launch disaster.data.gov to distribute information on preparedness during and after an emergency. More than 100 tools from public and private contributors have been submitted for inclusion on the site.

Inspired by lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy, in which residents lacked information on power and fuel availability, the Energy Department is testing Lantern Live, a new mobile app that will feature the status of gas stations, and allow users to report power outages.

“You all here today and the effort that’s associated with this really do help bring the whole-of-nation approach to building preparedness because it relies upon integrating the efforts of the private sector, nongovernmental actors, communities, individuals, federal, state, local, tribal and territorial governments,” said Rand Beers, deputy homeland security adviser to the White House National Security Council. “What we need to do is to build on this collective group of people who are committed to making our country safer and to responding to these kind of issues.”