Turning Intelligence Into Action After a Disaster

Disasters don’t overwhelm communities because of a lack of equipment alone. They overwhelm communities because information is incomplete, unstructured, and poorly shared. Power is out, communications are degraded, rumors spread faster than facts, and people act independently based on assumptions instead of reality.

The Community SITREP (Situation Report) exists to counter that chaos.

It is a post-disaster community intelligence product designed to assess real-world conditions, identify degraded capabilities, and create shared situational awareness so families, Mutual Assistance Groups (MAGs), and neighborhoods can make informed response and recovery decisions.

Community Intelligence Starts Before the Disaster

Effective post-disaster assessment does not begin after the event — it begins during preparedness.

Initial Community Intelligence is the baseline understanding of:

Who lives in the community and who is vulnerable
Where critical infrastructure and dependencies exist
What hazards are likely and what cascading failures may occur
What resources, skills, and limitations exist at the household and MAG level

This baseline is developed through deliberate preparedness activities, including the Personal Preparedness Assessment Workbook and area studies. It answers a critical question:

“What does normal look like, and where are we fragile?”

Without this baseline, post-disaster reporting becomes guesswork. You cannot accurately assess damage or degradation if you never understood what “fully functional” looked like in the first place.

From Baseline Intelligence to Situational Awareness

When an incident occurs, intelligence shifts from static to dynamic.

The focus is no longer on probability or planning assumptions — it is on current conditions:

What is working?
What has failed?
What is getting worse?
What is stabilizing?

This is situational awareness, and the Community SITREP is the mechanism that creates it.

Rather than relying on emotion, rumor, or isolated observations, the SITREP provides a structured, repeatable method to capture reality on the ground and communicate it clearly across the community.

What the Community SITREP Captures

The Community SITREP is intentionally concise and operational. It establishes:

Time, location, and operational period
Incident status, size, and scope
Current and forecasted weather
A lifeline-based assessment of community capabilities

This ensures information remains current, relevant, and decision-focused, even as conditions evolve.

Community Lifelines: Assessing What Keeps the Community Alive

At the core of the SITREP are Community Lifelines — the essential functions that must operate, at least minimally, for a community to survive and recover.

These include:

Safety & Security
Food, Water & Shelter
Communications
Energy
Transportation
Health & Medical
Hazardous Materials

Each lifeline is assessed for:

Current status
Trend (improving, stable, or deteriorating)
Estimated time to return to full capability (“green”)

This approach prevents tunnel vision. A community may appear stable until a single failed lifeline — communications, water, or power — cascades into multiple secondary failures.

This page is the FEMA page on Community Lifelines. I’ll be adding a more preparedness oriented one in the near future.

The Community SITREP as an Intelligence Fusion Product

The Community SITREP does not collect intelligence directly. It fuses inputs from multiple intelligence-related activities into a single shared picture.

Human Intelligence (HUMINT)

Reports from neighbors and MAG members
Welfare checks and face-to-face observations
Visual confirmation of damage, injuries, and needs

Often the primary intelligence source in the first hours after a disaster.

Signals Intelligence / Communications Intelligence (SIGINT / COMINT)

Amateur radio, GMRS, and local net traffic
Loss or restoration of repeaters, cell service, or internet
Message traffic indicating unmet needs or emerging risks

Even silence is intelligence.

Technical & Infrastructure Intelligence (TECHINT)

Power, water, fuel, and transportation system status
Generator availability and fuel burn rates
Equipment failures and workarounds

Directly informs multiple lifelines.

Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT)

Weather forecasts and warnings
Utility outage maps and public alerts
Official emergency communications

OSINT provides context and validation but should never override verified ground truth.

Information Collection

The Community SITREP message/form provides a structured snapshot of current conditions affecting a community during an incident or disruption. It collects essential administrative details (who the report is to/from, timing, location, incident number, and operational period), a concise assessment of incident status, size, scope, hazards, and near-term weather impacts, and a standardized review of critical lifelines. These lifelines—safety and security; food, water, and shelter; communications; energy; transportation; health and medical; and hazardous materials—are each reported with current status and estimated time to recovery (“ETA to green”), enabling leaders and community members to quickly understand priorities, risks, and where support or action is needed.

The form is available on the Formatted Messages – downloads page.

Why the Community SITREP Is Not a Threat Assessment

This distinction matters.

Threat and Hazard Assessments:

Are pre-incident
Focus on probability, impact, and risk
Answer “What might happen?”

Community SITREPs:

Are post-incident
Focus on actual conditions and trends
Answer “What is happening right now?”

Keeping these roles separate prevents confusion and improves decision-making.

Using the Personal Preparedness Assessment Post-Disaster

The Personal Preparedness Assessment Workbook is not only a planning tool — it is also a post-disaster reassessment tool.

After an event:

Assumptions may no longer be valid
Resources may be damaged or inaccessible
New constraints and risks may exist

Revisiting the assessment allows individuals and households to realistically evaluate:

What capabilities remain
What has been degraded or lost
What gaps now pose immediate risk
How long current resources are sustainable

This prevents one of the most common failures in disasters:
believing you are still prepared because you were prepared yesterday.

The Role of the Family Emergency Plan Post-Disaster

Where the Personal Preparedness Assessment focuses on capabilities, the Family Emergency Plan Workbook focuses on execution.

In a disaster, families need predefined answers to:

Where to shelter or rally
How to communicate when systems fail
Who is responsible for specific tasks
What triggers relocation or assistance decisions
How accountability is maintained

This structure allows families to act decisively rather than improvising under stress.

How Household Actions Improve Community Intelligence

Well-executed family plans improve community-level intelligence:

Faster accountability
Clearer welfare reports
Reduced duplicate efforts
Higher-quality HUMINT inputs

When families stabilize themselves first, community resources can be applied where they are truly needed.

How the Three Work Together

Used together, the system functions as a deliberate flow:

Family Emergency Plan Workbook
→ How we act and communicate
Personal Preparedness Assessment Workbook
→ What we have, what we’ve lost, what we can sustain
Community SITREP
→ What this means for the community right now

None stand alone. Each reinforces the others.

From Intelligence to Action

The true value of the Community SITREP is not the form — it is what the form enables:

Shared understanding
Common language
Coordinated response
Faster transition to recovery

The flow is deliberate:

Preparedness & Area Study
→ Initial Community Intelligence
→ Incident Occurs
→ Intelligence Inputs (HUMINT, SIGINT, TECHINT, OSINT)
→ Community SITREP
→ Situational Awareness
→ Response & Recovery Decisions

This prevents the most common post-disaster failure: everyone acting independently on partial information.