AWS Disaster Response Team volunteer Paul Fries runs cable to provide connectivity in a police station that has been converted into a supply distribution center and housing for National Guard troops and FEMA. During the crisis that has resulted in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, the AWS Disaster Response Team is providing personnel and resources […]
Should we care about the lives of our kids’ kids’ kids’ kids’…
We live during a time of live, real-time culture. Telecasts, spontaneous tweetstorms, on-the-scene streams, rapid-response analysis, war rooms, Clubhouses, vlogging. We have to interact with the here and now, feel that frisson of action. It’s a compulsion: we’re enraptured by the dangers that are terrorizing whole segments of the planet. Just this past month, we […]
BreezoMeter, which powers air quality in Apple’s Weather app, launches Wildfire Tracker
BreezoMeter has been on a mission to make environmental health hazards accessible to as many people as possible. Through its air quality index (AQI) calculations, the Israel-based company can now identify the quality of air down to a few meters in dozens of countries. A partnership with Apple to include its data into the iOS […]
Paladin publicly launches Knighthawk, a first response drone for cities
Emergency response is a time-sensitive business. When fires burn or a driver crashes their car, seconds can mean the difference between saving lives and watching a situation spiral rapidly out of control. For fire and police departments, getting teams on site can be challenging, what with the vagaries of traffic and bad routing. Houston-headquartered Paladin […]
FloodMapp wants to predict where water goes before it washes away your home
Floods are devastating. They rip asunder communities, wipe out neighborhoods, force the evacuation of thousands of people every year, and recovering them can take years — assuming recovery is possible at all. The U.S. government estimates that floods in recent decades (exclusive of hurricanes and tropical storms) have caused an estimated $160 billion in damage […]
Following the IPCC’s report, we need more technology to respond to more disasters
This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its major sixth assessment report on the physical science of climate change. The details are grim, if getting more precise, as better and more comprehensive data becomes available. As my colleague Mike Butcher summarized yesterday, it’s “stern and blunt in its conclusions.” UN’s IPCC report on […]
RapidSOS learned that the best product design is sometimes no product design
For the founders of RapidSOS, improving the quality of emergency response by adding useful data, like location, to 911 calls was an inspiring objective, and one that garnered widespread support.