When Waters Rise, Networks Matter - Orchestrating Disaster Response Across Scales

In the wake of the hurricane

In late September of 2024, Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina. Over 400 public roads were washed out. Rivers were rerouted. The deadly storm was widespread, impacting 39 of the state’s 100 counties, 4.6 million people. Costs in the aftermath have risen to nearly half the state’s GDP. Recovery efforts exposed a troubling paradox in modern disaster recovery. Despite abundant resources and willing volunteers, communities struggled to access critical help. Some are still struggling. This short video from the PBS News Hour shows the scope of the damage, and looks at the situation in North Carolina five months after the storm:

The long recovery from this disaster - and too many others like it - reveals a coordination gap. This gap is due to a structural mismatch in our approach to crisis response and recovery.  The story shows the mismatches across local regional and national scales of disaster response work. As with any major disaster, these three key tiers of necessary work surfaced in the wake of Helene:

1. emergent local recovery groups formed across the battered region 
2. regional organizations worked overtime
3. federal agencies mobilized $850 million, also offering technical and logistical help  

Closing the coordination gap requires addressing fundamental mismatches and making three critical shifts:

In this article, we’re joined by network development strategist and Helene survivor, Christy Shi-Day. She helps us look at what worked, what didn’t, and what we can learn from this experience of disaster recovery. We examine how the coordination gaps played out during Hurricane Helene, what worked, what failed, and how strategic network design can help close the gap, and better prepare us for when waters rise again.

Despite abundant resources, disaster recovery struggles

Large institutions and local communities operate at different speeds and scales. In spite of people's heroic efforts at each level, disaster recovery holds a paradox: even with abundant resources, help is slow to arrive. Local groups and volunteers live on the frontlines of disaster. They try to help, often in heroic and lifesaving ways, but have limited time and resources. Regional leadership provides more robust emergency response and supplies, but can’t see the realities in all communities. At the national level, large institutions have significant resources but deployment is much too slow for effective response. This is what coordination mismatch looks like.

NSF research from hurricane recovery in 2018 found that the root causes of most vulnerabilities and failures were: 

• silos and fragmented cross-sector collaboration
• isolated planning processes
• unseen dependencies (especially across infrastructures) and 
• ignorance about the needs of the most vulnerable (frontline) populations

Strategic network design is the deliberate design of information flows across scales of work.  Though abstract, this is critical infrastructure, not just a ‘nice to have’.  Strategic network design helps optimize distribution systems, improving response effectiveness after disasters. If you don’t have strategic network design, you end up with people lacking critical coordination infrastructure while in the midst of the turbulence of a disaster.

Governor Cooper’s December 2024 revised damage assessment (the source for the metrics above) notes that the long-term well-being of affected communities relies on coordination. It calls for “quickly mobilizing significant, flexible capital and proactively investing in local capacity and expertise to support post-disaster efforts.” Differences in scale, speed, and culture between scales make this hard. Larger funding systems, regional leadership, and local communities must bridge the coordination gap. How does this actually happen?

The orchestra has no conductor

A systemic disconnect between scales of work prevents resources from reaching those who need them. The crisis is not callousness, but coordination. Coordination gaps across levels of work chronically slow disaster response despite available resources. 

Three scales, one crisis - a gap in coordination 

At each scale, everyone did the best they could to do their jobs. These include: 

1. Frontline locals responding to immediate needs: People help people. These make up the human stories of rescues and tragedies. This work happens in near real-time or over days.
2. Regional support arrives with emergency training and greater access to resources:  First responders arrive, and work speeds often span several days or weeks. 
3. Federal support institutions mobilize resources:  With both red tape and large resource pools, response from the national scale is slower than hoped for - often months to years. 

Each scale has systems operating at different rhythms, focusing on different priorities. Each structures and shares power in different ways. Differences in scopes, speeds, and power distributions across these scales (local, regional, national) create friction or silos. Recovery efforts fail to see and account for these differences across scales. The coordination gap occurs because we lack cross-scale connections.

Deliberate linkages between local, regional, and federal disaster response layers enable effective information flow and resource allocation. The vital bridges that create pathways for local knowledge to inform regional coordination and federal deployment. Without them, things go haywire. Grassroots responders can't reach the right person in institutional systems. The institutions struggle to keep up with rapid changes in affected communities. They operate on quarterly planning cycles while communities need immediate action. State-level strategists focus on regional recovery while local teams tackle street-by-street challenges. The result is cacophony. Recovery leaders work hard to collaborate. They sync up for a moment, but inevitably fall out of step. Like an orchestra missing a conductor, our current system suffers from mismatched rhythms and out of sync scales. Sometimes the musicians can’t even hear each other, much less get in tune! 

Cacophony has a price. Silos and disconnected views of what is happening can be deadly. Misunderstandings, duplication of efforts, and confusion waste time and effort. This prevents resources from reaching the right places at the right time, and causes real harm on top of the crisis. Disaster recovery falters due to lack of clear connections across the three scales. Local, regional, and national scale decision-makers struggle need cross-boundary coordination. None of them can bridge the gap alone. The problem isn't incompetent people, or resource scarcity; it's network design.

What worked? Local volunteer networks filled the void

A human ‘switchboard’  

Early on during the hurricane response, local and county officials were often unavailable. Call centers flooded with requests. Attention focused on immediate response and life-saving operations. Facing this chaos, an ad hoc volunteer network gained traction. They rapidly deployed simple and accessible technologies (Signal chats and Google Docs). Pairing tech with clear social protocols, they helped bridge information gaps. The WNC Helene Resource Guide came to life.

This grassroots coordination system emerged not from institutional planning but from community need. Artie Hartsell, a community mobilizer, had experienced the 2018 flooding disasters in Haywood County, NC. The day after the storm, Artie created a shared document. He activated a nationwide network of friends and colleagues. Together, they helped maintain quality, timely content. The Guide included reports of missing loved ones, where to find access to supplies, who had generators, and more.  Meanwhile, Christy Shi-Day was on the ground setting up another shared document to start compiling vetted information.  Her experiences with Hurricanes Florence and Dorian had taught her the need for switchboard systems. She knew Helene was much bigger than those storms. Her document was designed to account for different scales of information - by county and for the region.  By day 3 she came across Artie’s work and they partnered. The volunteer information curators Artie had convened leveraged Christy's switchboard documentation structure for quick information access.

This ad hoc volunteer group was one of several such efforts. Each group helped relay information to people directly impacted, who were often experiencing extremely limited communication. The WNC Helene Resource Guide guide was decentralized. The information in it grew by light moderation combined with the use of comments. Volunteers and specialists could keep rapidly changing information accurate and readily accessible. Organized by county, the guide expanded to meet needs. Volunteers gathered information with light oversight rather than trying to check every detail. This approach worked well for the first few weeks after the storm, while official information systems were recovering. Once they did, the State’s 2-1-1 system referred people to the WNC Helene Resource Guide. FEMA community liaisons expressed gratitude for the network's work.

Temporarily effective infrastructure

Coherent social coordination protocols paired with simple tech tools. This made the network effective for the short-term. Social protocols included regular meetings, clear ways to participate, dedicated leadership, and small tasks for volunteers. Each technology used served a clear need:

• Signal chats supported rapid volunteer mobilization and real-time communication
• County-specific Google Docs prioritized local relevance over comprehensive coverage
• Comment-based crowdsourcing enabled community members to maintain accuracy
• Text-only information formats gave access to anyone with minimal connectivity

The rigid communication protocols of institutions are not designed for catastrophic infrastructure failure. For example, graphics-heavy, hard to download PDFs distributed as guidance to areas with limited bandwidth reveals a fundamental blind-spot. State and institutional communication systems struggle to understand on-the-ground realities. The volunteer team had to transform materials like these into accessible text-only formats within hours. The guides covered potable water safety, water conservation, and other disaster-relevant how-to guides. Vital information in a low-bandwidth format was accessible even with limited cell signal. In contrast, official requests took over a week to convert these same documents. Water systems contamination requires parents to have water safety information in hours, not a week. Cooperative, adaptable systems can outperform centralized ones during crises.

Loss of roads and telecommunications meant many people were cut off for long periods of time.  Helicopters ran non-stop during daylight hours to access people who could not otherwise leave. For many, daily work was suspended and energies redirected into disaster response.

Ivanna Knox, a forest service worker, was on foot to help clear debris in a remote area and came across a group of storm refugees. The storm home had cut off their home by relocating a nearby river. They were now stranded, unable to leave, and desperate for supplies.  The forest worker made a supply request list, and the WNC Helene Resource Guide volunteer network caught her post. 

At the same time, another volunteer in the network asked to help with recovery. Christy made a connection between them, also requesting some of the network’s GoFundMe funds. (The day following the storm, Christy had mobilized a GoFundMe to support lightweight interventions like this). Funds were available. The volunteer used the funds to get the needed supplies and delivered them to the forest worker. The next day, Ivanna hiked back out to the group stranded across the river. A makeshift pulley system brought potable water, food, and other critical resources to the families. Ivanna told Christy that her Facebook post hadn’t generated enough donations on its own. The connections made through the network to both funds for supplies and volunteer delivery were crucial to getting resources to those in need.

Local networks like these excel at just-in-time help. Multiple stories like this one bubbled up across the WNC Helene Resource Guide network. The social and technical infrastructure powering this network worked precisely because no single entity was in charge. While official systems were overwhelmed, cooperatively maintained networks worked to fill critical gaps. Other decentralized coordination efforts saw similar tales. Local people helped each other with supply deliveries, temporary shelter, even dangerous rescues. 

Teams and groups of volunteers have a shared experience, get to know each other, and build trust. People see a gap and establish working environments outside of or alongside more formal institutions. It happens in many ways. People and groups of people working together in an ad-hoc way to achieve a desired result  is what makes this a “network”.  No one is ‘in charge’. People just do what they see needs doing. They notice and fill needs in whatever way works. They build teams. Making key information, tools, and other resources visible and available to support this work is what we call “coordination.” 

But nimble, adaptive networks of local volunteers lack resources to maintain activities long term. The WNC Helene Resource Guide, and much progress made by this incredible network of volunteers, was lost. Without coordination processes to align the ad hoc network with regional and national authorities, their local knowledge, resources, and volunteer capacity was left out of longer term efforts. 

What failed? Consequences of Disconnected Systems

Missing Connections

The most revealing insight came as government systems recovered. Only one of 27 affected counties formally partnered with this grassroots network, becoming stewards of part of the guide.  The rest created separate, parallel resources. Many silos formed, valuable information channels fragmented, and the volunteer-run guide that had shown such success was no longer shared. The lessons learned were lost. 

Even though a lot of the ingredients to expanding their successful operation were there:

• established personal relationships between some volunteers and officials,
• a clear and organized body of work to help with recovery
• explicit requests from volunteers for negotiating a hand-off (made to FEMA, United Way 2-1-1, councils of governments, and the NC Office of Recovery & Resilience)

the institutions failed to build on the grassroots work. The formal civic institutions ended up starting over, costing precious time and resources precisely when they were most needed.

The Human Cost of Coordination Gaps 

People seeking help got caught in bureaucratic loops that ignored real-world obstacles. Delays impacted housing, utilities, food, and other things essential for recovery.  Some storm survivors were directed to churches for rental assistance. They discovered that the programs required formal eviction notices, making help impossible. Relief funds available only once per household excluded those who had previously accessed aid. Official guidance rarely highlighted these kinds of details. Many survivors encountered incomplete or misleading information. These exceptions and technicalities compounded the trauma of the disaster with frustration, overwhelm, and disengagement. Too often, this ultimately led to people distrusting the very institutions who were supposed to be helping them. 

Local governments almost never intersect with or successfully leverage community crowdsourcing networks - the lines between government and grassroots are too clearly drawn. After Helene, volunteers operated outside formal constraints. They stayed up all night texting with concerned individuals. They tracked down missing persons, and provided continuous support for survivors in need. Official agencies could mobilize significant resources, but failed to get them to the right place quickly enough. The limitations of strict roles and liability concerns slowed down help. Broad, impersonal communication defaults made help, when it did come, less effective. Each entity follows its protocols. It works at its own scale. But collectively, authorities can’t integrate with the community-driven networks that emerge in disasters. But these networks often fill critical gaps, and provide some of the most effective immediate disaster response.

Silos can have devastating results 

The coordination gap between national, regional, and local networks can be life threatening. In the aftermath of Helene, the AP reported a heartbreaking story: Begging for help in North Carolina as that help is slow to arrive. In a fatal example of the coordination gap, an elderly couple and their grandson died. While at home in Texas, Jessica Drye Turner learned her parents and nephew were stranded by the storm on their roof. In spite of repeated pleas on social media and clear information available about their situation, help did not reach them in time. 

The immediate aftermath of the storm offered hundreds of heartbreaking, often life-threatening stories. These tales are too often a result of cross-scale systemic disconnects. Months later, thousands of people living through the long recovery still await help that may never come.

Fundamental structural barriers actively prevent cross-scale collaboration. The result is real harm to disaster survivors:

• Local officials default to familiar partners rather than emergent coordination systems
• State agencies prioritize county governments over grassroots initiatives
• Federal agencies require state-level invitation before engaging with community networks

Each scale has strengths at its own level. 

• Local networks are often more agile, community-centered, and responsive to immediate needs. 
• Regional organizations, when functioning well, provide crucial coordination across jurisdictional boundaries, and specialized expertise. They mobilize established support networks to sustain longer-term recovery efforts. 
• Federal agencies bring unmatched resource depth, standardized processes for equitable distribution, and national-scale logistics capabilities and technical expertise essential for massive rebuilding efforts. 

Public participation practices in disaster response remain largely top-down. Formal structures limit integration of grassroots efforts. Once official channels reactivate and communication resumes, volunteer networks have filled critical gaps. But official response systems struggle to incorporate them. Valuable community-led initiatives become sidelined or abandoned, delaying recovery opportunities to combine the strengths of all three scales.

How can we address scale disconnections to create more strategic disaster response networks?

Three Key Mismatches: Why Good Intentions Fail

How can families in crisis with known needs and locations be left to fend or die? It’s not red-tape or malice at the root of these problems - it’s a mismatch of structures and scales. People working within heavy bureaucracies will have a hard time bringing rapid help to a neighborhood destroyed by a sudden storm. Common complaints indicate coordination gaps. Repeating patterns lie at the root of these complaints. And three key scale mismatches generate these difficult patterns. 

Let’s look at the pattern and scale mismatch for each complaint:

“Can’t they see what we’re dealing with here?!?”

This complaint signals a pattern of resource Invisibility. 

Information or resources are available but remain hidden from those who need them. Decisions move forward without critical local knowledge. This is a mismatch of SCOPE. Scope mismatches occur when top-level and ground-level perspectives clash. A single community still underwater cannot fathom the actions of a regional authority reducing aid because of state-wide improvement. This complaint indicates that the things one group thinks are of key importance are not the same as another. 

“Why can’t we just talk with each other?” 

The root cause of communication frustration is often a pattern of information overload. 

Multiple siloed conversation channels create too much noise. This noise increases as people step up to lead initiatives. Key information gets lost in the chaos. Participants burn out from constant communication demands because it’s impossible to listen to everyone, everywhere.  When people can’t listen, and often when they don’t feel heard, look for a mismatch of SPEED. The speed of work naturally varies widely across scales. But because we lack ways to sync work happening at different rates, frustration with ‘bureaucracy’ is common. Local needs require immediate action, yet moving resources is done with painfully slow processes. Trying to stay up to date and make sense across these varied speeds of work leads to information overwhelm.

“When will we get the resources to fix this?” 

Although this can sound like resource invisibility, this complaint often signals power imbalance.

Top-down control limits local actions. Local communities want to access and control the resources for recovery to meet needs that seem obvious. Local knowledge is too often devalued or ignored. But communities can also flounder with the opposite challenge: no one stepping into a needed position of authority. Communities may fear sharing information that impacts aid if decisions happen without their voice at the table. Those with resource access too often don't have local knowledge. Those with local knowledge often lack clear authority to act. Obviously, POWER is the mismatch here, and often the hardest to address (because Humans). Our default power structures create conditions for dominance or conflict.

How scale misalignments block effective recovery

• SCOPE: Everyone is working in silos without understanding what is happening at other scales. Each - local, regional, federal - tend to think their map is the ground truth. 
• SPEED: Rapidly changing local information is collected in surveys or meetings that ask the wrong questions;  regional leaders can’t synthesize it quickly enough anyway; federal resource updates fall on overwhelmed ears or don’t reach the right people; they are slow to respond to needs.
• POWER: Long approval times for resource access block regional action. Too often people wait for someone else to take responsibility - or, despairing of help, they take too much on themselves. Negotiation avoidance leads people to fail to access resources that are available.

Disaster response is a hugely complex problem. Managing even a single organization - or one community - in the face of a crisis is hard enough! Coordinating across multiple scales seems impossible. How can we fix this fundamental flaw in the structure of our recovery networks? 

Three Critical Shifts: Building Bridges Across Scales

Let’s first understand how to recognize when we’re dealing with a cross-scale mismatch. Day-to-day frustrations showing up in after-action reports as ‘coordination challenges’ represent broken cross-scale connections. The various scales of recovery work should be working together. Most people and organizations partner or collaborate with others at the same scale. Disaster response needs cross-scale patterns of coordination. Networks for this cross-scale work can be intentionally designed.  When done well, resource flow improves from the top, as does info flow from the frontlines. Designing them well requires considerations of scope, speed, and power.

Luckily, addressing scale mismatch doesn’t require restructuring entire systems or new organizations. If effective allocation of resources is the aim, we need to establish practices that facilitate working across scales. Focus on building connection points between existing layers.  People at any scale, and in most roles, can help re-connect and close the coordination gap.

Here’s three key shifts to help this critical cross-scale work happen: 

SCOPE: Make what’s happening - and who’s involved - visible

Create shared situational awareness. Sharing moves the work forward, identifies blockers, and helps surface collaborative possibilities. Gather stories of realities that different groups are working from. Recognize that people need to see WHO is doing what, WHAT is happening, as well as HOW to help. 

In practice, this might look like: 

• WHO - Network maps with basic information for key groups and resources. Include key contact, main resource or link, and things like the size or location of the groups.   
• WHAT - Simple color-coded situation maps, updated daily. Show the key recovery information within your scope. This might include resource distribution, damaged infrastructure, and response team locations.
• HOW - Physical coordination boards at emergency operations centers. Consistent layouts help to share key metrics, bottlenecks, and success stories. These make community voices and needs visible to all responding agencies.

SPEED: Build two-way information flows

Make a habit - daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on needs - of sharing key progress, blockers, and needs. Predictable rhythms create ‘drum beats’. Make opportunities to coordinate that signal when and where to share what information. This reduces information overwhelm while helping people align across scales. A regular cadence gives people a sense of safety, builds trust, and re-orients new or inactive people as they loop in. Our nervous systems are trying to recover from shocks. They regulate us, and we co-regulate each other. Consistency helps create co-regulation within groups and across scales. 

Here’s some ideas for grounding this habit:

• Implement daily status updates for participating groups across scales. Standardized templates can help capture essential information. These can also streamline distribution for multiple channels (ie: radio, text, email).
• Identify ‘bridges’ - Some people naturally move between scales, especially local and regional. Find them, and support their ability to carry and exchange information in both directions.
• Develop a quick "pulse check" form for local responders and community leaders to flag urgent needs. Use this to trigger a review at regional and national levels.

POWER: Find ways to share or at least clarify power

Even within the most rigid systems, power can be shared more effectively. Whether by addressing common requests, communicating  clearly about decisions, or calling out blockers during coordination meetings, start where you are.  Ideally, create safety by structuring  network connections in a less top down and more agentic way. Be sure that it’s not just the same folks talking - make ample opportunities for voices from different perspectives and scales to be heard.  For a minimum move towards healthy power, clarify who’s in charge. This makes power explicit, even if it’s not shared.

Sharing power is tricky and takes practice. Here’s some ways to start: 

• For team leaders at any scale, practice co-leadership. This is a small step that helps prevent burnout and bottlenecks, and builds trust. Be sure that all co-leaders check in periodically with key contacts within at least one other scale.
• Explore pre-authorization of specific resource requests under predetermined thresholds.
• Advocate for "reverse briefings" where local teams speak first at coordination meetings. This can ensure ground-level perspectives shape strategic decisions before national priorities are discussed.

When the Waters Rise Again: Being ready

The horrendous disaster of Hurricane Helene offers valuable lessons for developing networks. We ignore these lessons at our peril. All communities need not only disaster resilience, but mutual aid, health access, poverty reduction - the list goes on. We want strategic coordination across groups to support these complex challenges. To coordinate well, we need to organize across scales. 

Imagine a similar hurricane hitting a community, but this time, an existing strategic network is in place. A family stuck on a roof with only a cell signal discovers how and who to reach locally or regionally that has the capacity to help. They don’t need to try to communicate their plight to distant family or on social media. Regional governments get ahead of the chaos faster by leveraging community-led networks, and recovery goes faster.  Better situational awareness and deployment of resources result. Lives and property are saved. National resource stewards deploy their funds, field researchers, and technical assistance with more efficiency and confidence. 

Strategically designed networks have cross-scale connections. They reduce coordination gaps by establishing shared awareness, two-way communication channels, and distributed decision-making authorities. These shifts allow the disaster response ecosystem to function as a coherent whole rather than as disconnected, siloed layers working at cross-purposes.

Lessons for emergency managers, community organizers, and tech developers 

Interested in strategic network design? Think about: 

1. Prioritize low-bandwidth solutions. When infrastructure fails, the most accessible tech—not the most advanced—becomes most valuable.
2. Build co-leadership models that allow for rapid trust establishment. The volunteer-led guide gained credibility because community members directly participated in maintaining it.
3. Design for interoperability between formal and informal systems. Communications - and their technologies - should bridge institutional and grassroots efforts. Don't force people to choose between them.
4. Develop transition protocols between emergent and established systems. The failure wasn't in creating effective coordination. The failure was in sustaining it as institutional capacity returned.
5. Create persistent coordination infrastructure before disasters strike. Strategic disaster response networks shouldn't need to be built from scratch during each crisis. Find what's already available to you. Start now.

One small shift: Include coordination in job duties

Closing the coordination gap isn’t anyone’s job. Like the worst wicked problems, this work falls in the cracks between areas of clear responsibility. It’s chronically underfunded. But any organization can make one small change to create conditions for a strategic network. Add something like the following to at least a quarter of your job descriptions and roles:  

• ‘foster cross-scale partnerships’ 
• ‘sync regularly with key regional leaders’  
• ‘find local partners and gather stories of need and success’ 

…or some version of a similar prompt. Then help people to do it. We all have a position in the current system. From wherever we sit, let’s learn to look up and look down. Anyone can be a bridge and help access key information. Start where you are. If you’re good at bridging the coordination gap, help those around you learn to stay in sync.

Let’s build strategic networks to coordinate across scales. Prepare today, for when it matters most. Start now from wherever you sit in your communities and networks. Make the small but critical shifts that close the coordination gap. For even our biggest problems, small shifts in how we coordinate can make meaningful differences in our communities. Practice making decisions together and sharing resources more effectively. Get good enough at this kind of cross-scale syncing, and we might even get better at new kinds of democratic civic participation. 

Socialroots is informed by this approach to strategic network design and aims to help close the coordination gap. We’re actively listening to the experiences of network coordinators like Christy Shi-Day. Some of this is cultural, some of this is learned processes, some of this is technological. 

We aim for a more adaptive approach to networks by creating technology that: 

• doesn't force a choice between institutional authority and community agility, and 
• allows autonomy for participating groups - whether  volunteer networks or formal agencies - to define their own permissions. 
• is purpose-built for syncing across groups and closing coordination gaps

Information flows turn from fire hoses to manageable faucets. Maps and network metrics become more visible and accessible, streamlining resource flows. Silos and duplication of effort start to lose power. Let’s focus on collaboration with more confidence within our wider networks by closing the coordination gap for disaster recovery and many other kinds of critical networks! 

If you’re interested in early access, co-design, or cooperative participation, let us know!