This Week in Disasters
Floodwater from the Toccoa River surrounds homes at the Georgia-Tennessee state line in McCaysville, Ga. Source: Georgia Department of Natural Resources
Plus, RAND researchers found 1,179 AI tools for emergency managers. Jessica Jensen explains why most leave the work to them.
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.
If you want to receive exclusive news, updates, and job postings, sign up for This Week in Disasters here.
Major Disasters of the Last Week
Three days of storms from October 30 to November 1 flooded northern and central Arizona, where crews rescued at least 40 people along Oak Creek near Sedona. Gov. Katie Hobbs declared a statewide emergency on November 2, and Yavapai County lifted the last of its evacuation orders, which covered 253 homes, on November 4. Read more. |
Up to 2 feet of rain fell on southern Brevard County, Florida, on November 1 and 2. Palm Bay's mayor said hundreds of people were rescued, including more than 60 by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission on November 2 alone. Gov. Ron DeSantis has since expanded his state of emergency to 14 counties. Read more. |
Up to 11 inches of rain fell overnight from November 4 into 5 in the north Georgia mountains, flooding McCaysville, Georgia, and Copperhill, Tennessee. The river through Copperhill rose higher than at any point in 80 years of records, and the National Weather Service issued a rare flash flood emergency as crews used rafts for rescues. McCaysville declared a state of emergency. Read more. |
Overnight flash flooding from October 31 into November 1 in Pearl River County, Mississippi, trapped five people in vehicles who had to be rescued and forced seven more from their homes. County emergency management received reports of eight flooded homes and damage to Highway 43. Read more. |
Forecasted Risks to Watch for the Next Week
A Flood Watch covers Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts from early Friday through Saturday morning. Rain totals of 2 to 4 inches are possible, with isolated amounts of 5 to 6 inches, and leaf-clogged storm drains could add to street flooding.
Damaging winds return to Montana's Rocky Mountain Front Friday afternoon and again Sunday. Gusts could reach 65 mph on the eastern slopes in the first round and 85 mph on Sunday, making travel hard for high-profile vehicles and knocking out power in spots.
Santa Ana winds bring a Red Flag Warning to parts of Los Angeles and Ventura counties on Saturday. Gusts to 45 mph and humidity as low as 8% from the Santa Clarita Valley to the Santa Monica Mountains could drive rapid growth on any new fire.
Rocks and downed trees cover a northern Arizona highway after record rainfall and flooding. Source: Arizona Department of Transportation
Disasters in the Headlines
"Navigating Disaster Housing: From Proactive Resilience to Recovery Funding"
"Why fall brings a second severe weather season to the CSRA"
"When Disaster Doesn't Meet the Threshold: The Rural Recovery Gap in America"
"When the storm hits, the private sector must show up"
PRO PERSPECTIVE
Most of the 1,179 AI Tools Built for Emergency Management Miss the Emergency Manager
Emergency managers are asked to take on more each year, often with the same staff and budget. AI keeps getting pitched as a way to carry some of that load, yet almost no one had mapped what's for sale. Jessica Jensen and her RAND colleagues set out to. They expected to find a few dozen AI-enabled products built for emergency management. They found 1,179.
Jensen is a senior policy researcher at RAND. Before that, she spent 18 years at North Dakota State University, where she ran the emergency management department, and she's one of the few people in the field with a Ph.D. in emergency management. Her team's report, AI and the Future of Emergency Management: Market Supply and Adoption Pathways, came out August 4 funded by the Markle Foundation's AI for Disasters and Emergencies (AIDE) Initiative.
Jensen's read on the 1,179 is that most were built from the vendor's side, with little input from the people who would use them. The cost lands on emergency managers, who end up doing work the products should do for them.
Vendors Decide What Buyers Get to See
Vendors control what a buyer gets to see. Each product lives on its own website, with whatever the company chooses to share about price, data requirements, and features, and most companies don't publish prices at all. It took RAND code connected to several large language models, plus a team checking the results by hand, to pull that information together. An emergency manager gets a conference booth, a demo, and a pitch to take on trust. Any digging past that comes out of a workday that's already full. "That's not on emergency managers," Jensen says.
Even the products that surface leave work behind. More than 40 percent are general-purpose tools with no emergency management design. The manager has to read a vendor's technical specs and decide whether a tool built for someone else fits their work. "That is really, really demanding for people that don't have IT backgrounds, right? They're emergency managers," Jensen says.
Vendors Build for Response. Emergency Managers Spend Their Time on Preparedness and Recovery.
Vendors also chose which problems to solve, and most chose response. Response is the phase people see on the news, with flooded streets and rescues that pull at anyone watching, so builders assume that's where technology is needed most. Some build what interests them. "Sometimes you just want to do something cool because you think it's cool and because you can. That does not mean that it is what the field needs," Jensen says.
Response also isn't where most of the job happens. Emergency managers spend more of their time on preparedness and long-term recovery, so tools for that work may be in higher demand than the ones flooding the market. A vendor would have to sit with emergency managers to learn that. "That's not something you know unless you work with emergency managers," Jensen says.
Every Tool Covers One Slice, and Managers Do the Stitching
Even a product aimed at the right problem tends to cover one piece of it. After every disaster, the field says it wishes it had a common operating picture, one shared view of need, impact, and who is doing what, where. The data for it exists in traffic feeds, shelter counts, and school closure reports. But a traffic tool shows traffic and a shelter tool shows shelters. No one tool puts them on one map, shares them across agencies, or helps a manager decide what to do next. A local emergency manager Jensen worked with called that setup "the nightmare we are living in now."
Jensen's good news is that the technology to merge those streams already exists. What's missing is a vendor that designs a product to integrate them from day one, so managers don't have to buy three tools and link them. Survivors hit the same wall from the other side. After losing a home or a loved one, they apply program by program and nonprofit by nonprofit, proving the same losses each time. Jensen's ideal recovery tool lets them apply once.
Products Built for Big Offices Miss Most of the Field
Most products also assume an office with IT staff, steady data inputs, and a constant internet connection, the report found. That leaves out most of emergency management. Small offices make up most of the field, and for them the gap comes down to money. "If you can't pay for it, you can't pay for it," Jensen says. Clearinghouses and peer networks help, but she puts the bigger fix on vendors. "You design for the smallest capacity organizations, not the largest capacity organizations, because they dominate the emergency management space," she says. A tool built for a small county office with no IT department can scale up to a big city. A tool built for a big city rarely scales down.
Buying is the other wall. The report names funding, staffing, IT capacity, and procurement as the most persistent barriers, and Jensen hears about procurement trouble over and over. Yet she hasn't found a single study that looks across the country at where procurement and IT policy slow adoption or stop it. She'd start one tomorrow if she could. If the same rules hold up adoption in state after state, the field could change them with one shared approach instead of fighting them one jurisdiction at a time. The AI methods her team built could run that study quickly.
The Tools Exist. The Fit Has to Come From Vendors.
The AI tools emergency managers need are out there. RAND's assessment shows what keeps them out of reach. Most of what keeps them there traces back to decisions vendors made without the people who would use their products. Vendors can make different decisions. Publish the price. Build for preparedness and recovery, where emergency managers spend their days. Connect the data instead of selling it in slices. Design for the county office with no IT department, because that office is most of the field. Every one of those choices puts the right help in front of a community sooner.
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.
Texas - Severe Storms, Straight-line Winds, Tornadoes, and FloodingSTATUS Major Disaster declared September 1, 2026; Individual Assistance added October 30, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until December 29, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Bandera, Bexar, Comal, Crockett, Dimmit, Frio, Gillespie, Kendall, Kerr, Kimble, Kinney, La Salle, Maverick, Medina, Real, Schleicher, Sutton, Uvalde, Val Verde, Zavala |
Florida - Hurricane IsaiasSTATUS Major Disaster declared October 27, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until December 26, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Bay, Escambia, Gulf, Holmes, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, Walton, Washington |
New Mexico - Severe Storms and FloodingSTATUS Major Disaster declared October 7, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until December 14, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Zuni Pueblo (Indian Reservation) |
West Virginia - Severe Storm and FloodingSTATUS Major Disaster declared October 7, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until December 7, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Fayette, Harrison, Kanawha |
Wisconsin - Severe Storms and TornadoesSTATUS Major Disaster declared October 7, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until December 7, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Forest, Outagamie, Vilas, Winnebago |
Guam - Super Typhoon BaviSTATUS Major Disaster declared October 7, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until December 7, 2026 |
Ohio - Severe Storm, Straight-line Winds, Tornadoes, Flooding, and LandslidesSTATUS Major Disaster declared October 2, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until December 1, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Clermont, Franklin, Hamilton, Licking, Morgan, Muskingum, Perry |
South Dakota - Severe Storms, Straight-line Winds, and FloodingSTATUS Major Disaster declared September 1, 2026; IA applications accepted in eligible counties until November 30, 2026 AFFECTED COUNTIES Oglala Sioux Tribe of the Pine Ridge Reservation |
Sign up for This Week in Disasters here.
