Flights of fancy (and a bit of vulgarity) continue over in the editorial offices of the Onion as they present their take on recent disasters: a personified Earth is tired of humans’ presence.
How society views and ‘socializes’ disaster is as important as the ‘science’ predicting and understanding disaster physical characteristics.
Crowdsourcing is being used as early indicator of earthquakes according to an article at:
www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20130711-using-crowdsourcing-for-earthquake-monitoring. The full, original report is at: www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/CitizenSeismology_FINAL.pdf
FEMA.gov has lots of info, and I came across their Data Visualization page, and found their summary of fire reporting for the state of Washington was interesting:
According to the inspector general (IG) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), state and local fusion centers and emergency operations centers could improve the response of their jurisdictions to terrorism and natural disasters if they talked to each other more often. Many fusion centers and EOCs surveyed do not exchange information.