fema_hazard_mitigation_2021

[This data is published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license]

About this story

The Ring in Ashes

As natural disasters worsen, President Biden is directing FEMA to shift more of its efforts to preventing them. This work was always a small part of the agency’s role, but now Biden has committed an unprecedented $5 billion in new funding to minimize future disasters, and Congress designated several billion dollars more in its recently passed infrastructure bill.

Methodology

The analysis done by The Post can be reproduced using FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance Projects open data and joined with with FEMA’s Disaster Declarations Summaries data to determine which designated disasters occurred between three time periods

• declared disaster date and approval date

• approval date and closed date and

• declared disaster date and closed date or October 1, 2021 if the project was still open.

About the data

The data for the purpose of sharing methodology was pulled from OpenFEMA.

• Hazard Mitigation Assistance Projects - v2*

• Disaster Declarations Summaries

Folders of note in this repo

• data/raw_data - Downloaded data from the OpenFEMA

• scripts/import - Scripts to prepare FEMA data and exploratory analysis

• outputs/findings - Exploratory notebook

• outputs/summaries - Summarized county-level data and enhanced FEMA data to join to FEMA’s original projects data set

Notebooks

• Analysis - Methodology and analysis for story

Explorer app

To run the app, you must have R version 3.5 or later installed first.

Via terminal

After you’ve installed R, In the terminal, run

R -e "install.packages('shiny', repos='https://cran.rstudio.com/')"
R -e "shiny::runGitHub('fema_hazard_mitigation_2021', 'wpinvestigative', ref="main", launch.browser=TRUE)"

Via RStudio

The application can be run locally with the following command in R Studio:

install.packages("shiny", repos="https://cran.rstudio.com/")
shiny::runGitHub("fema_hazard_mitigation_2021", "wpinvestigative", ref="main")

troubleshooting

If you have connectivity issues, you may need to preinstall some packages:

# run these lines in RStudio console

packages <- c("tidyverse", "shiny", "shinyWidgets", "lubridate", "shinythemes", "DT")
if (length(setdiff(packages, rownames(installed.packages()))) > 0) {
  install.packages(setdiff(packages, rownames(installed.packages())), repos = "https://cran.us.r-project.org")  
}