Dear Senators:

When the ashes of the 2003 California Wildfires settled, my mother had lost her home.  It was the home she had lived in since she graduated high school and married my father, and the house my three brothers and I grew up in.

During the initial evacuation and the days that followed, help was everywhere, but it was completely disorganized.  It was hard to know who was offering what.  Where we could get the help we really needed?  In the days following she attended every public meeting with every public official that had held a meeting.  She went to the FEMA center and did all of the things they tell you you’re “supposed to do” after a disaster, we were still at a loss as what to do next.  Shortly thereafter all of the disaster relief workers seemed to disappear and we were left on our own to figure out how to recover.

Later we realized that this was the case in most communities affected by the fire

What we really needed were answers, information.  Months later we realized that the information we needed really was out there.  The problem is that it gets to survivors and communities very sporadically.  Without a central point of information disbursement, the knowledge is spread inequitably between different survivors and, as we saw in the 2003 California Wildfires, even between communities.  Communities, as well as survivors, are left to their own devices and as such, each receive different things based on what they happen to find and are at the mercy of figuring it out from scratch every time.

In the last 10 years every county in California has had a declared disaster.  In the age of information it seems ridiculous to re-invent the wheel every time a disaster hits.  Why should this happen when the information and knowledge is out there if it could only be directed to the right people?  It seems like a complete waste of time and money when only simple direction and facilitation is needed.