As the nation prepares for the 2024 hurricane season, the U.S. Census Bureau is ready to provide critical information for all stages of disaster management. This year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Weather Service forecasters at the Climate Prediction Center predict above-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin.

Every year, to help communities prepare for possible disasters, we like to remind our users about the data tools our agency has that can help communities in their time of need. And just like last year, I now want to share how the Census Bureau provides data on where vulnerable populations live via our many tools. Once an event occurs, we combine housing, population and business data generated by the Census Bureau with data from other government agencies such as NOAA, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to understand the demographic and economic characteristics of hard-hit areas to help ensure more targeted and equitable response and recovery efforts. 

The Census Bureau has broadened its tools to produce more information and insights to respond to disasters. An important part of disaster preparation and risk mitigation is building resilient communities. Community resilience is a measure of the capacity of individuals and households within a community to absorb, endure and recover from the external stresses of a disaster. And research shows that resilience can be predicted by individual and household characteristics. 

In 2020, we created an interactive tool called the Community Resilience Estimates (CRE) that measures a community’s ability to bounce back from a disaster. The idea behind the CRE is that different communities will fare differently during extreme events depending on individual and household characteristics within the community. The estimates use risk factors to model resilience such as income to poverty ratio, number of adults in a household, number of people in a household, communication barriers, education level, employment status, disability characteristics, health insurance status, age, vehicle access and broadband internet access. While other entities produce similar metrics, they are based on publicly available data. Our estimates are based on our full suite of information increasing the reliability of our numbers for rural and other areas not typically represented well in other datasets.

When a storm is approaching or after a disaster occurs, concern shifts to response and recovery. Combining our data on people and business with weather, fire and other disaster-related data via GIS (Geographic Information System) provides a trove of data and tools that zero in on the people, businesses and workers in impacted areas.