Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy were only seven years apart, but the emergency response made it seem like the storms were centuries apart. The response to Katrina became somewhere between a mess and a punchline, while images of Sandy’s response were seen as far more positive.
As Joseph Marks writes in the most recent Government Executive magazine, an increased emphasis on the sharing of data and responsibilities is the reason the Sandy response was so much more effective than that of Katrina. In the story, Marks paraphrases FEMA CIO Adrian Gardner in saying that that data sharing makes such a recovery “look less like individual efforts from an alphabet soup of agencies and more like a unified response.”
Marks told host Ross Gianfortune that hurdles to sharing still remain, but groups and agencies are pushing for more data sharing to help citizens and make government more effective.
