This Week in Disasters
The Plaskett Fire. Source: InciWeb
Plus, a hurricane that never made landfall left 92% of Kauai without power.
Welcome back to This Week in Disasters! This newsletter combines expert perspectives with a weekly roundup of upcoming threats, recent natural disasters, and available survivor assistance. If you're a Risk, Insurance, Employee Assistance, or Emergency Management professional (or you're just really curious about weather in the United States!), you're in the right place.
Today marks 25 years since September 11, 2001, a morning that took 2,977 lives, more than 400 of them first responders, and remade this profession, from the creation of the Department of Homeland Security to the generation of emergency managers who came to the work because of it. To everyone who responded, rebuilt, and still carries that day, we remember with you. Never Forget.
Major Disasters of the Last Week
Hurricane Lowell passed roughly 80 miles west of Kauai overnight Monday into Tuesday without making landfall, yet knocked out power to 92 percent of the island's utility customers and forced about 300 residents to evacuate. Wind gusts near 85 mph downed trees and power poles and tore up sections of coastal road, and Kauai Mayor Derek Kawakami reported extensive damage as crews shifted from sheltering to islandwide assessment. NBC News reports the storm also prompted the first tornado watch ever issued for the state of Hawaii and dropped preliminary rainfall totals of up to 21 inches on Kauai. Read more. |
High surf from Tropical Storm Marie, churning hundreds of miles off the California coast, flooded streets and homes in Long Beach and Seal Beach over the Labor Day weekend. Firefighters evacuated about 20 oceanfront homes between 63rd and 67th Place on Monday night after days of waves compromised the seawall and damaged the boardwalk, and building inspectors were dispatched to evaluate cracked concrete between the homes. Read more. |
Firefighters reached 73% containment on the Plaskett Fire this week, and Monterey County downgraded several evacuation orders to warnings on September 9. The Plaskett and neighboring Timber Fire have burned a combined 55,000 acres along the Big Sur coast since August, and evacuation orders remain in parts of both fire zones, with Highway 1 closed in two segments. CAL FIRE cautioned that critically dry fuels remain capable of supporting additional fire activity on the 27-percent-contained Timber Fire. Read more. |
Forecasted Risks to Watch for the Next Week
Severe thunderstorms are possible across eastern Nebraska Friday evening as a cold front moves through. Large hail, damaging winds, and a brief tornado are possible.
Heavy rain shifts to the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes Sunday and Monday. An upper-level low may spread across the northern Plains, with wet snow possible over the higher elevations of western Montana.
Aftermath of Hurricane Lowell in Kauai. Source: Kauai Department of Transportation
Disasters in the Headlines
In an Age of Perpetual Climate Disaster, Rebuilding Is the Wrong Goal
Where on Earth is safest from global catastrophe?
Will 2026 go down with no Atlantic hurricanes?
PRO PERSPECTIVE
What would you ask a satellite?
On September 9, emergency managers, technologists, researchers, and public officials gathered at the AT&T Conference Center at the University of Texas at Austin for the AIDE Summit, the flagship event of the AI for Disasters and Emergencies (AIDE) Initiative. Backed by the Markle Foundation, Aspen Digital, and RAND, the roughly 200-person gathering moved AIDE from a year of research into a coalition built for action.
AIDE spent the past year studying which AI tools are in use across emergency management, how practitioners are adopting them, and where the gaps sit between what those tools promise and what they deliver. The summit was where that research met the field, drawing attendees from state and local government, the private sector, civil society, volunteer organizations, and academia.
The clearest theme of the day was that AI in emergency management is a decision-support story. Jeremy Greenberg, senior advisor at Aspen Digital, put the field's opportunity in predictive analytics and decision support rather than conversational interfaces. Mark Sloan, homeland security emergency management coordinator for Harris County, added the practitioner's frame. AI is another tool supporting the emergency manager, and judgment built on experience stays with the human. I didn't hear a serious proposal all day that took the human out of the loop. The goal is better thinking, and decisions that hold up when they're tested.
Time and trust
The summit's thesis was that AI's value in emergency management comes down to whether it buys back time. Every hour an emergency manager spends on manual data reconciliation is an hour not spent on the decisions only a human can make. Used well, AI clears the administrative work so people can think more clearly and move faster when it counts.
Speed only helps if trust keeps up with it, and trust has to scale. A model that performs well in a pilot doesn't automatically earn confidence across fifty states, a thousand jurisdictions, and every disaster type in between. The harder question is how the field builds that trust at scale. The answers on offer were transparency, testing, and accountability. Adoption numbers are not evidence of trust.
Where the field falls short
Funding is the persistent constraint. Emergency management programs are chronically under-invested relative to the mission they're asked to carry. Alerts and communications still don't reliably reach all Americans, a basic capability gap that AI can support but not close. Situational awareness in a fast-moving incident remains difficult even with better tools. And staffing hasn't scaled to match the mission, so agencies stay stretched thin no matter what technology sits on top.
Does AI fix any of this, or does it make bad processes run faster? A predictive model built on a broken workflow doesn't fix the workflow. A tool is also only as reliable as the people feeding it and reading its output, which leaves the field with a question it hasn't answered. How accurate are the people entering and using this data, and are emergency managers fluent enough in AI to know when to trust a result and when to challenge it?
A practical tool to take home
AIDE released the Practitioner Playbook for AI Readiness and Adoption at the summit, a step-by-step guide for emergency managers and their partners working through AI adoption. The Playbook lays out a Readiness Track for building general organizational capacity and a five-stage Use Case Track (Plan, Commit, Exercise, Expand, Integrate) for evaluating, testing, and scaling a specific AI tool. It answers the fluency question with a shared framework agencies can use to build AI literacy before they're rushed into an adoption decision. The Playbook is available at aideinitiative.org/playbook.
What comes next
The Initiative is moving from research and convening into funded pilot projects, launching in January and running roughly a year, to test AI tools in real-world emergency management settings. That's where time and trust either hold up or they don't.
For those of us building technology in this space, the summit confirmed what we see from the inside. Disaster recovery's problem is coordination, capacity, and the discipline to fix a process before automating it. More tools won't solve that. Bright Harbor will follow AIDE's pilots closely, and we're holding our own work to the same test: what does it take off an emergency manager's desk, and does the result hold up when someone checks it?
Active Federal Declared Disasters and Deadlines
There is usually a 60 day window to apply for help after a disaster is declared. The following disasters are actively taking applications from survivors for financial support. To apply, survivors can visit DisasterAssistance.gov or call the FEMA Helpline at 1-800‑621‑3362.
Louisiana - Tropical Storm ArthurSTATUS Major Disaster declared June 30, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until October 1, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Avoyelles, St. Landry, St. Tammany, Terrebonne |
West Virginia - Severe Storm, Straight-line Winds, Tornadoes, Flooding, Landslides, and MudslidesSTATUS Major Disaster declared August 3, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until October 3, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Lewis, Upshur |
Northern Mariana Islands - Super Typhoon BaviSTATUS Major Disaster declared August 3, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until October 3, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Rota (Municipality) |
Mississippi - Tropical Storm ArthurSTATUS Major Disaster declared August 3, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until October 3, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Hancock, Harrison, Pearl River, Stone |
Indiana - Severe Storm, Straight-line Winds, Tornadoes, and FloodingSTATUS Major Disaster declared August 25, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until October 25, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Hancock, Harrison, Pearl River, Stone |
Hawaii – Kona EarthquakeSTATUS AFFECTED COUNTIES Hawaii |
Oglala Sioux Tribe – Severe Storms, Straight-line Winds and FloodingSTATUS Declared September 1, 2026. Individual Assistance available across the Pine Ridge Reservation. No application deadline has been published yet; check DisasterAssistance.gov. |
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