In the 1980s, a billion-dollar weather disaster hit the United States about once every three months. Over the past decade, the average gap between them has fallen to about 16 days, according to the nonprofit research organization Climate Central. The frequency of these disasters is outpacing the systems designed to respond to them.
As emergency management agencies contend with one disaster after another, their ability to coordinate an effective response depends on having timely, accurate information about fast-changing conditions. Much of that information already exists, but it is often scattered across disconnected systems. During a disaster, the time it takes to find, contextualize, and act on that information can stand in the way of an effective response.
Peregrine Technologies‘ operational intelligence platform helps emergency managers overcome that challenge by turning fragmented information into shared situational awareness, giving the organizations responsible for disaster response the context they need to coordinate their efforts and act decisively.
A disaster almost every two weeks
The United States recorded 23 separate weather and climate disasters in 2025 that each caused at least $1 billion in damage, together costing about $115 billion and killing an estimated 276 people, according to Climate Central. The costliest single event of 2025, the January wildfires in Los Angeles, accounted for an estimated $61.2 billion of that total on its own.
When a hurricane is bearing down or a wildfire is jumping a ridge, the facts a response needs almost always exist somewhere. River gauges are reporting. The weather service is issuing updates. Utilities know which neighborhoods have lost power. Shelters know how many beds are open. Road crews know which routes are closed. The trouble is that each of those lives in its own system, and during the hours that matter an emergency manager is often left toggling between several browser tabs and taking calls from multiple sources at once, trying to build a single picture from feeds that were never designed to talk to each other.
The evolution of coordinated emergency response
The importance of coordination in emergency management has been understood for decades. In the 1970s, a series of devastating California wildfires exposed the challenges of responding to large-scale emergencies across multiple agencies. Firefighters, law enforcement, and other responders lacked a common operating picture for coordinating personnel, resources, and decisions, making an already dangerous situation more difficult to manage.
In response, the U.S. Forest Service and its partners developed the Incident Command System (ICS), establishing a common structure for managing emergencies across organizational and jurisdictional boundaries. Over the following decades, ICS became widely adopted across emergency services and eventually formed a central component of the National Incident Management System (NIMS), introduced in 2004 to establish a consistent nationwide approach to emergency management and coordination.
More than 50 years later, the fundamental principle remains the same: effective emergency response depends on agencies working together. The frameworks developed decades ago established how these organizations could coordinate their efforts. As disasters become more frequent, the challenge is ensuring that the systems supporting this coordination can keep pace, giving responders timely access to the information they need to make informed decisions.
How technology is advancing coordinated emergency management
For much of the history of emergency management, coordinating a response required significant manual effort. Today, platforms like Peregrine are making it possible to build on decades of established practices, connecting and contextualizing information across disparate systems to give emergency management teams a shared, continuously updated understanding of an unfolding situation.
Consider the information required to coordinate a hurricane response: weather forecasts, river levels, road closures, power outages, shelter availability, and the locations of emergency personnel and equipment. Each data source offers valuable insight, but when that information is scattered across disconnected systems, emergency managers must spend critical time gathering and interpreting it rather than acting on it. Modern technology can bring these sources together, revealing relationships that might otherwise be difficult to identify. A rising river level, for example, becomes more actionable when viewed alongside nearby roads, vulnerable communities, and available evacuation resources.
This shared situational awareness strengthens coordination at every stage of emergency management. Before a disaster, agencies can assess vulnerabilities, develop response plans, and allocate resources. During an emergency, they can monitor changing conditions, coordinate their efforts, and make informed decisions as new information becomes available. In the aftermath, connected information can support damage assessments, recovery planning, and documentation for disaster assistance.
Peregrine, the leading operational intelligence platform for the public sector, makes this possible by connecting information from existing agency systems into a secure, permission-aware operational environment. Organizations retain ownership and control of their data, while authorized personnel gain access to the context they need to understand changing conditions and coordinate their response. AI can further support this work by helping personnel analyze information, identify relevant patterns, and surface critical developments, while keeping consequential decisions in human hands.
As disasters become more frequent, the need for effective coordination will only grow. The next evolution of emergency management isn’t about replacing the practices developed over decades. It’s about giving the people responsible for protecting our communities better tools to put those practices into action, helping them work together more effectively when every decision matters.