Hurricane Sandy Disaster Response
We donated our software and the expertise of our Philanthropy Engineering team to organizations working to provide relief to those affected by Hurricane Sandy.
We donated our software and the expertise of our Philanthropy Engineering team to organizations working to provide relief to those affected by Hurricane Sandy.
In October 2012, Hurricane Sandy devastated portions of the Caribbean, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeastern United States, causing more than 250 deaths and $60 billion in damage. Team Rubicon and Direct Relief International are just two of the organizations that mobilized to respond, and we are honored to have supported their efforts.
Team Rubicon is a non-profit relief organization that dispatched volunteers from its network of nearly 5,000 military veterans to provide relief to those in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. They distributed supplies, cleared debris from damanged buildings and transportation routes, and coordinated the actions of 10,000 spontaneous volunteers.
“The Palantir software acts as a force multiplier. The software addresses a common problem in dispatching crews for disaster relief: lack of real-time communication.”
– Ford Sypher, Regional Director, Team Rubicon
Team Rubicon used our software to streamline and scale their disaster relief operations. Members of our Philanthropy Engineering team embedded with Team Rubicon at their command center in the Rockaways. While on site, our engineers developed a plug-in that allowed volunteers to collect requests for assistance using smart phones and iPads. We trained volunteers to use Palantir Gotham to collect requests for assistance, prioritize them according to urgency, dispatch resources appropriately, and track progress toward completion.
Beyond the partnership with Direct Relief and Team Rubicon, we are also committing to partnering with businesses and organizations that can assist in providing additional necessary hardware, technology, and services to support and supplement our donations of software, hardware, and engineering expertise. We will continue to deploy engineers and data scientists as new resources in the supply chain of disaster relief efforts in order to expedite the delivery and effectiveness of relief.
This commitment is the first of its kind. It brings together military knowledge, medical and pharmaceutical expertise, local partners, volunteers, data scientists, medical supplies, technology and general disaster relief expertise to more efficiently meet the needs of vulnerable communities hit by calamities.
“The organization set up a command center at 124th Street, where residents can file requests for assistance, and with the donation of a computer-mapping program, by Palo Alto-based software company Palantir, Team Rubicon has been able to track the work orders and send teams out quickly.”
“Imagined as operating system for data problems, Palantir’s software was able to pull in information from multiple sources of data, fuse it together into a coherent picture of the state of the peninsula, and then allow Team Rubicon operators to efficiently dispatch volunteers...”
“Palantir’s software is applicable in such situations because it is designed to deal with large, disparate data sets.”
“Although in many ways this was really a pilot test of the system, mobile information tools from Palantir brought tremendous intelligence to bear on field-based humanitarian assessment and opened the promise of extending our analytic capacities more directly into events as they happen.”