Hawaii’s emergency decision support system was funded by FEMA

As the administration of President Donald Trump eliminates staff and programs for emergency planning and response, including at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, one program in Hawaii is demonstrating the value of preparing for natural disasters.

The Geospatial Decision Support System, which was funded by a FEMA grant and operates out of the Hawaii State Energy Office on O’ahu, is providing data dashboards that show officials critical information — like the amount of fuel left on the island — along with maps and flowcharts that display at a glance which critical facilities would be affected by disruptions to Hawaii’s energy infrastructure.

Jonathan Chin, an energy assurance specialist for the Hawaii State Energy Office, has called the system a “a fully integrated mapping, risk assessment and mitigation generator.”

He told StateScoop that the information it provides, however seemingly basic, was previously scattered across various map layers and other assets, and had to be collected in a scramble during past emergencies, like the wildfires that ravaged Maui’s northwest coast in 2023.

But with the new system on hand, Chin said, the energy office, the Office of Homeland Security and the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, now enjoy a “common operating picture” that helps staff prepare for and respond to disasters.

“A lot of times when an event happens, FEMA’s got a great [geospatial information systems] team, and they’ll come out and they’ll set up mapping for the event specifically,” he said. “But it’s a mad rush to get [map] layers and information and data, so having it already set up is key.”

Scoring risks

The GDSS, which is built on Esri’s ArcGIS Insights platform, links on the map all of O’ahu’s critical energy infrastructure — power plants, electrical substations, its oil refinery, pipelines and fuel terminals — to the island’s community centers, like fire houses, police stations, hospitals and senior facilities. The tool uses historic climate data and probabilistic models to generate risk scores for potential scenarios, like disruptions to various fuel pipelines.

Chin said the system helps the state quantify risk, prepare for disasters and appropriately allocate resources.

“The novel part of GDSS is that it really looks at those interdependencies, and it’s not just mapping where things are, but it also shows a flowchart essentially of ‘this hospital would be dependent on this substation’ and anything upline from that,” he said. “In that way, it kind of allowed us to score each of the energy assets as well in terms of their criticality to community lifelines.”

The project took several years to get going — after signing an agreement with the Office of Homeland Security in 2017, Chin said, his office in 2020 won a $600,000 FEMA grant that led to an inventory and risk analysis of the state’s energy sector. It was 2022 by the time the project began, and the GDSS was completed around October 2023.

Chin said projects like this one are important because much of the state’s energy sector is unregulated and data is hard to come by, even for government agencies like his. He said Hawaiian Electric, which serves the vast majority of the island’s residents, shares data with the Public Utilities Commission, but otherwise prefers to hoard information that government planners and emergency managers want.

“Getting any good information from any of the utilities or the fuel providers — they protect it heavily,” Chin said.

One component integrated into the system collects data from the fuel industry on a monthly basis and displays how much fuel is available on the island. Chin said this is especially useful when a hurricane shuts down the ports, cutting Hawaii off from the barges that deliver its fuel.

Federal cuts

Projects like Hawaii’s GDSS could become less common under the Trump administration, which last month eliminated hundreds of positions from FEMA as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency unit made cuts sweeping across the federal government.

FEMA, which is operated by about 25,000 staff, helps communities respond to and recover from emergencies when they grow too large to be managed by their state governments. The agency helps state and local governments rebuild damaged roads, bridges, schools and water treatment plants. It also helps fund repairs to damaged homes.

The agency is currently managing dozens of emergencies and recovery operations, including wildfires in California, severe storms in Kentucky and West Virginia and Hurricane Helene recovery in North Carolina.

In January, Trump visited North Carolina after it had been devastated by Helene. There, he remarked that FEMA was “not good,” The New York Times reported. He’s suggested on other occasions that FEMA should be eliminated.

Last October, Trump accused Joe Biden’s administration of diverting FEMA funding to house illegal migrants. A FEMA spokesperson at the time called the claims “completely false.” Last month, Cameron Hamilton, the acting head of the agency announced he was suspending payments sent to New York City. Around the same time, Elon Musk claimed on X that the city had spent $59 million in the course of one week on “luxury hotels” for migrants.

A spokesperson from the Office of New York City Comptroller told StateScoop last month that $80.5 million in funds had been seized from a city bank account that had been delivered through FEMA’s Shelter and Service program, which was subsidizing a $12.50 shelter per diem the city was offering.

The Shelter and Service program is administered in conjunction with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to provide shelter and other services to noncitizen migrants after being released by the Department of Homeland Security. According to FEMA’s website, the program’s purpose is to “support CBP in the safe, orderly, and humane release of noncitizen migrants from short-term holding facilities.”

In addition to the almost $36 billion in disaster relief funding FEMA received in fiscal year 2024, it also received $5 billion for its flood insurance program, $1.5 billion to cover administration and $4 billion for grant programs, which helps fund projects like Hawaii’s data dashboards and maps.

Chin said the GDSS project probably wouldn’t have happened without federal funding.

“The amount of money we get from the state is pretty miniscule compared to the grants that we get,” he said. “We’re pretty consistently chasing federal grants.”

The first phase of the GDSS includes energy infrastructure on O’ahu, which has the largest population. Chin said the state has also applied for an additional $450,000 FEMA grant to expand the project statewide and gain a better understanding of the movement of fuel barges between islands.

While merely knowing where things are may seem like basic information that every government already has on hand, Chin said that at a recent conference he discovered that Hawaii is ahead of many other states in this regard.

“Even though it seems like a really simple thing, just understanding where things are is already kind of a breakthrough,” he said.