NLT Blog - New Light Technologies

Pioneering the Future of Disaster Management with Cutting-edge Solutions

Written by Ran Goldblatt | Oct 17, 2024 3:49:14 PM

As the frequency and severity of natural and man-made disasters continue to rise, organizations need robust solutions to mitigate risks and enhance their disaster preparedness. For 24 years, NLT has been providing its clients with cutting-edge solutions for disaster management across multiple sectors. With decades of experience, NLT delivers end-to-end disaster management support tools for clients, ranging from federal agencies like FEMA and USACE, Census, and USDA to state and local governments such as DC Government and Louisiana to international organizations like the World Bank.

 

Supporting FEMA in its Mission to Save Lives

With nearly 20  years of experience supporting the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), NLT has established itself as a trusted partner, supporting the agency in its mission to help communities before, during, and after disasters and ensure effective, coordinated response and recovery operations. NLT has been instrumental in developing FEMA award-winning disaster management solutions, including tools for real-time predictive analytics and operational decision-making, geospatial data integration, predictive analytics, and cloud-based platforms. These allow effective sharing and distribution of geospatial data and applications among interagency partners and the community. From supporting the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) in architecting enterprise computing infrastructure, to assisting FEMA's Response Geospatial Office (RGO) with advanced tools that make disaster response more efficient; from modernizing incident management systems for the National Preparedness Division (NPD) to developing the next generation platform for online mapping and exercise simulation within the for the Center for Domestic Preparedness (CDP); and from developing innovative tools used by the National Response Coordination Center (NRCC) for situational awareness and real-time analytics, to supporting FEMA`s Office of Business, Industry, and Infrastructure Integration (OB3I) in its mission to understand the economic impacts of disasters - NLT has always been at the forefront to equip agencies such as FEMA with the most effective tools and intelligence as well as talented professionals that allow emergency responders to prepare and act faster than ever. 

The NLT Team, including its consulting partners across the industry, have been leading the development of novel decision-support tools to identify community lifeline risks, guide search and rescue operations, prioritize resources, assess damages, disseminate information and expedite disaster operations. Developed by NLT, the Prioritizing Operations Support Tool (POST), for example, is a web-based tool that allows users to predict and prioritize hazard risks to populations and critical infrastructure. The Tool for Emergency Management Prioritization & Operations (TEMPO) which NLT is developing for FEMA, ingests POST`s predictions and integrates them with real-time data feeds and advanced predictive models, making it a unique platform for interactive web-based visualization and reporting. TEMPO has become the tool of choice for FEMA’s analysts and decision makers.

For FEMA's OB3I, NLT helped develop the Business and Economic Analysis Dashboard (BEAD). BEAD is the first tool to provide the agency with continuous, accurate, and detailed insights and data necessary to understand disasters' economic impacts on businesses, industry, and supply chains. It provides intelligence that can be leveraged to optimize response logistics support and to monitor and facilitate stabilization of community lifelines through the recovery process. By offering real-time risk analytics and predictive tools, NLT helps ensure that critical industries, such as utilities and businesses, can mitigate risks and respond more effectively to disruptions. These solutions integrate economic and supply chain data to provide actionable insights into risks and constraints during disaster events​.

Together with its partners, NLT is continuing to develop real-time hazard models, automate damage assessments using AI/ML, and facilitate data sharing across federal, state, and local agencies. NLT has always been committed to enhancing FEMA's ability to protect and support communities before, during, and after disasters over 20 years of various types of disasters, including hurricanes, river basin floods, tornadoes, and wildfires to name a few.

 

Multi-Sector Solutions for Disaster Management

FEMA is not the only federal agency leveraging NLT`s disaster management tools and capabilities. Over the years, NLT has successfully served agencies across the U.S. federal departments of Commerce, Agriculture, Defense, and Homeland Security, building a reputation as a trusted partner for critical missions, including those focused on strengthening the nation’s resilience to disasters. NLT distinguished itself as a leader in the delivery of real-time risk analytics and decision support services for rapidly changing disaster response and recovery scenarios across the nation. Since 2008, NLT’s interdisciplinary team of Economists, Geographers, Statisticians, Computer Scientists, and Cloud Engineers provide the US Census Bureau of Statistics with a full lifecycle of big data and digital transformation services, making the Bureau a world leader in economic and social measurement. Tools such as the OnTheMap for Emergency Management provide the public with an intuitive web-based interface for accessing U.S. population and workforce statistics, in real time, for areas being affected by natural disasters. The tool allows users to retrieve reports containing detailed workforce, population, and housing characteristics for hurricanes, floods, wildfires, winter storms, and federal disaster declaration areas. It equips emergency managers, decision-makers, and responders with unique capabilities to visualize the impacts of hazards on the population and workforce in specific geographic regions and leverage its actionable, localized data to address the unique challenges posed by disasters. 

NLT also plays a crucial role in enhancing disaster resilience at the state and local levels. Leveraging its IMPACT Platform and working with the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH), It developed an advanced real-time facilities mapping and analytics system that allowed LDH to quickly assess hurricane impacts and identify service populations in need. This cloud-native platform provides interactive tools for planning, reporting, and managing disaster recovery efforts​ as well as with advanced real-time analytical and mapping capabilities to quickly assess the potential impacts of emerging disasters on health facilities across the State, helping the agency  respond effectively to disaster impacts improving the department's disaster resilience and response capabilities​.

Beyond the U.S., NLT’s disaster management support services extend to international organizations like the World Bank and UN Agencies. By leveraging geospatial data analytics, remote sensing, and economic modeling, NLT has been providing the World Bank with crucial support in a wide range of projects across dozens of developing countries to aid monitoring and mitigating the impacts of disasters on these countries. NLT is developing tools that monitor trends in economic activity with satellite imagery to track the economic impacts of disasters, conflicts, and pandemics, providing insights into recovery progress and disruptions in economic systems. NLT has also revolutionized models that monitor urbanization, land cover changes, deforestation, disease monitoring, and other environmental factors relevant to detecting early signs of disasters such as flooding, land degradation, and food security issues. It also aids in building capacity by developing curricula and training governmental agencies and local institutions in emerging economies, empowering them to monitor environmental and socio-economic processes more effectively, improving their disaster preparedness and response capabilities. By providing comprehensive disaster management services and cutting-edge tools, NLT empowers governments and organizations worldwide to anticipate, respond to, and recover from disasters more effectively.

 

IMPACT:  Revolutionizing Disaster Management 

With years supporting dozens of clients across the private and public sectors from State to local governments, NLT has gained a reputation for being a leader in transforming complex hazard and risk data into meaningful actionable information that improves disaster management operations. IMPACT is a disaster management platform that allows responders, planners, and survivors to monitor, analyze, and respond to disaster situations effectively. The platform provides a range of tools to mitigate the economic and personal impacts of disasters, including situational awareness, disaster visualization, and damage assessment functionalities. It allows users to visualize the spatial extent and severity of damage in near real-time, offering critical insights for decision-making during and after disasters; it provides timely evaluations of disaster impacts on buildings, infrastructure, and communities; it integrates various data sources, including demographics and open data, to enhance disaster planning and response efforts to enable a more comprehensive understanding of the affected populations and the resources needed to support them and provides tools that enable teams and communities to engage and collaborate on disaster response efforts.

With its unique capabilities and intuitive User Interface, IMPACT offers clients a flexible range of solutions for disaster management, from email notifications for incidents in areas of interest through access through live incident exposure data feeds, to the development of customizable, public-facing web applications that allow estimating, visualizing and reporting the impacts of disasters in real-time. Through its robust planning and analytics capabilities, IMPACT equips agencies with the the most crucial information they need to reduce economic effects and protect vulnerable communities.

NLT: At the Forefront of Disaster Management 

With an unparalleled understanding of disaster management complexities and a proven track record of innovation, NLT continues to be a trusted partner in strengthening disaster resilience across sectors. Whether its real-time predictive analytics or comprehensive training programs offered by NLT for disaster managers, NLT delivers the solutions needed to manage disasters efficiently, ensuring communities and industries can recover faster and stronger than ever before. 

As the world faces increasingly unpredictable threats, NLT’s dedication to harnessing the power of technology and data makes it a critical player in building a safer and more resilient future. NLT harnesses the power of science and technology and actualizes digital transformations that will yield a more resilient nation for the future. 

 

About NLT

New Light Technologies, Inc. (NLT) is a leading provider of integrated information technology, technical, scientific, consulting, and research services based in Washington, DC. NLT provides a broad range of integrated cloud, agile software development, cybersecurity, data science, geospatial, and workforce services and ready-to-use solutions for customers and offers distinctive capabilities in developing secure cloud-native AI/ML data analytics and decision support tools. The firm also provides unique expertise in designing, implementing, and managing enterprise solutions that enable the collection, integration, modeling and analysis, privacy protection, quality control, visualization, and public release of large-scale datasets and web-based data dissemination platforms.  Contact us for more information and set up a conversation with our team members about this and other related work we do in climate-related projects at the local, national, and global levels.