What Happened?

I recently experienced another major disaster (Hurricane Sandy) and was discussing with a friend what I'd like to know about the recovery, both to understand how to help now and also anticipating that this will happen again and we should start to prepare for a more general ability to help at a citizen level.

Also, we're over a week in an you can't find a damage assessment on any of the cities' websites:

  http://www.nyc.gov/html/index.html
  http://www.nyc.gov/html/residents_alt.html
  http://www.cityofjerseycity.com/
  http://www.hobokennj.org/sandy/

Lots of news and links, but how many people are homeless?  How many need coats?  Food?  We shouldn't assume the government knows and is taking care of it.

Summary Maps

Google has a summary map up here http://google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy, but this should really be embedded in city pages like NYC's, JC's and Hoboken's.  It has amongst other things:

• affected areas, i.e. flood extent map, power outage areas
• important damage locales, areas that were damaged more than average, e.g. destroyed neighborhoods

Population Needs/Haves

Next, it is standard procedure for FEMA/USAID/OCHA to collect a baseline disaster assessment, but this can take a long time.  Hence, people are starting to do less formal "crowd-sourced" assessments.  I can help do this.

These are the dimension I'd like to see from a phone survey or neighborhood walkthrough of randomly selected households from all of the wards:

• are you living in your home?
• how many people live with you?  age & gender?
• do you have warm, dry shelter?
• ability to cook?
• days of drinking water (ideally, 1 week or more)?
• days of food  (ideally, 1 week or more)?
• working plumbing?  days of flushing water?
• daily shower? hot water?
• market basket prices?
• personal safety/crime rates?

Infrastructure Damage and Reconstruction

In addition, there should be a simple report of basic infrastructure issues, including status and recommissioning schedules for:

• water & sewage
• electric, natural gas, petroleum
• transportation: roads, tunnels, bridges, rail, buses & waterway (incl. ferries)
• clinics, EMR, general and pediatrics
• cell & sms
• emergency TV, radio stations