This profile of FEMA chief Craig Fugate is very encouraging in regards to our nation's preparedness. Two things stood out to me as I read the article--specifically, the ways that Fugate's philosophy meshes very closely to ours here at Depiction. Though it came out originally a while ago, I think they are still worth noting.

First, Fugate is very big on asking "What if?":

In Florida, Fugate was notorious for what he called “Thunderbolt” drills. Once a month, he’d walk into the office with a large Starbucks coffee and tell everyone to stop what they were doing and respond to a catastrophe baked in his imagination. Sometimes it was a blackout; other times it was a small nuclear bomb.

“People are afraid to fail. I’m seeking failure,” he told me. “I want to break things. I want to see what’s going on so we can fix it.”

These "Thunderbolt" drills are the kinds of things that Depiction is built to make easy, because, like Fugate, we believe that these kind of "what if?" questions are vital to preparedness.

Second, he highly values citizen engagement and preparedness:

“We need to change behavior in this country,” he told about 400 emergency-management instructors at a conference in June, lambasting the “government-centric” approach to disasters...

To avoid “system collapse,” as he puts it, Fugate insists that the government must draft the public. “We tend to look at the public as a liability. [But] who is going to be the fastest responder when your house falls on your head? Your neighbor.” ... Already, Fugate is factoring citizens into the agency’s models for catastrophic planning, thinking of them as rescuers and responders, not just victims.

In some ways, this is the ultimate goal of Depiction--to equip everyday people with powerful tools that let them do things that would otherwise require extremely expensive software and an immense amount of technical experience. Our preparedness add-on pack, in particular, is designed to help individuals and neighborhoods prepare themselves using software used by professionals.