Disaster Risk: Improvements Needed to Enhance FEMA’s National Risk Index

Filed 47m ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

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A GAO review finds that FEMA's National Risk Index, the agency's tool for scoring communities' disaster risk, only partially follows leading practices for risk assessment and information quality. FEMA published methodology details but never explained how emergency managers should actually apply the results, nor how to use the index alongside FEMA's other risk tools.

FEMA also skipped consistent sensitivity analyses that would reveal whether its methods over- or under-estimate specific hazards, and it has no mechanism to systematically collect user feedback on whether the tool is even useful. GAO's three recommendations include building that feedback loop; DHS agreed to two of them but rejected the sensitivity-analysis recommendation, arguing it has no plans to update NRI data anyway, which GAO says misses the point entirely.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

An index that scores your town's disaster risk but can't tell you what to do with the score is like a bathroom scale that just says a number and walks away. DHS's excuse, that they don't plan to update the data so why bother checking the math, is the kind of logic that only works until the next flood proves the math wrong. GAO's not asking for much, just that the agency find out if the thing it built actually helps anybody.

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: Duet Musette · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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