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Census Bureau demos Emergency Management Hub; presenter says FEMA data appear in tools within hours
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Summary
The U.S. Census Bureau demonstrated its Emergency Management Hub and connected data tools in a webinar, showing how My Community Explorer, OnTheMap for Emergency Management and Community Resilience Estimates can help local planners. Presenter Kimberly Davis said FEMA-declared disasters are loaded into the tools within about four hours.
The U.S. Census Bureau on a recent webinar demonstrated the Emergency Management Hub, a single‑page platform that aggregates local data planners can use for disaster preparedness, response and recovery. Kimberly Davis, a data dissemination specialist who leads the demonstration, walked through the hub’s datasets and live tools and said FEMA-declared emergencies are ingested into the Census tools within roughly four hours of the agency’s declaration.
Davis said the hub consolidates timely resources and linked data from sources such as the American Community Survey, Community Resilience Estimates, County Business Patterns and nonemployer statistics, and it links to partner content (for example, the American Red Cross and National Weather Service). “The emergencies come into us from FEMA, and they’re loaded into this interface within 4 hours of FEMA declaring a disaster,” Davis said during the demonstration.
The webinar included live demos of three tools. In My Community Explorer, Davis selected Montana and Liberty County to show population counts, household totals and measures of social vulnerability; she cited that 19.5% of the state population had three-or-more components of vulnerability in the tool’s statewide view and that roughly 39.96% of Liberty County’s population ranked at three-or-more components in the example she displayed. The Community Resilience Estimates viewer defaults to the three-or-more components measure and lets users toggle to 0 or 1–2 components and drill to county and tract (neighborhood) levels to reveal localized pockets of higher vulnerability.
OnTheMap for Emergency Management (part of the LEHD suite) presents ongoing events and lets users search by event, disaster identifier or place name. Davis demonstrated narrowing a disaster-area view to a single community (she used Hutchinson, Kansas, as an example) so analysts can see demographic, housing and workforce details for the locality within the broader declared disaster area. She also showed that the tool can export event-area data and generate shareable links for partners.
In a question-and-answer exchange, an attendee asked how long it takes for FEMA information to integrate into the Census tools; Davis repeated the four-hour figure for the data tools. When asked how the Census defines poverty, Davis explained that the Census uses national money-income thresholds that vary by family size and composition (a national threshold rather than a location-specific poverty line) to determine who is counted as in poverty.
The presenters said the webinar recording and supplemental materials will be posted on the Census Academy site within 30 business days, and they provided a contact address for further help: census.askdata@census.gov. The session ended with a brief evaluation invitation and closing remarks from Crystal Jimmerson, a Census training specialist.
