{"id":771839,"date":"2026-03-31T04:47:18","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T11:47:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=blog&#038;p=771839"},"modified":"2026-03-31T10:25:32","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T17:25:32","slug":"team-rubicon-hurricane-melissa-aid-effort","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/team-rubicon-hurricane-melissa-aid-effort","title":{"rendered":"How High-Tech Maps Helped Team Rubicon Mount One of Its Biggest Aid Efforts"},"author":671,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"industry":[],"esri-blog-category":[478642],"esri_blog_department":[478242],"class_list":["post-771839","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esri-insider","esri-blog-category-disaster-response","esri_blog_department-public-safety"],"acf":{"video_source":"","video_start":"","video_stop":"","short_description":"When Hurricane Melissa devastated Jamaica, Team Rubicon showed how geospatial technology can turn disaster chaos into coordinated action.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Right","content":"<div><span lang=\"EN\">When Hurricane Melissa became Jamaica's most destructive storm on record, Team Rubicon's response showed how geospatial technology can turn chaos into coordinated action\u2014at the speed disaster demands.<\/span><\/div>\r\n<div>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Key Takeaways<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>A new geospatial portal helped Team Rubicon plan and track one of its most complex disaster response mobilizations in years.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>A shared geospatial data backbone reduced duplication of efforts and accelerated assistance for Jamaica's most vulnerable people.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>More in-depth geospatial post disaster analysis helps improve research and future operations.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<\/div>","snippet":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As a tropical cyclone gathered strength in the Atlantic last October, inching toward Jamaica, Francesca Williams watched from her desk in Texas, getting nervous.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cIt was just creeping, just sitting there getting stronger and stronger and stronger, and Jamaica, it's a tiny island with limited resources,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As the senior leader of mission support at Team Rubicon, a veteran-led disaster response nonprofit, Williams helps coordinate legions of volunteers across the US who jump into action on short notice after catastrophic wildfires, floods, and storms.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cThere were just incredibly warm waters\u201488 degrees,\u201d she said. The cyclone, dubbed Melissa, intensified into a Category 5 hurricane within hours. \u201cThat's when I knew that we would try to do something,\u201d she said. \u201cI didn\u2019t know that we would be responding like we did.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On October 28, the hurricane slammed into the western side of Jamaica as the country's strongest on record, beating 1988\u2019s Hurricane Gilbert and unleashing catastrophic winds and torrential rain. Forty-five people in Jamaica would die from Melissa and its aftermath, and more than 626,000 people across the country would be displaced or impacted.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the hours after landfall, that was all still unknown. The fog of disaster was still clearing. Much of Jamaica\u2019s electricity was out, and it would be days before basic communications were restored across the 33-mile-long swath of damage.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"gallery","gallery_images":[771845,771842,771841]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Williams needed to see more. She opened a website she had been developing\u2014a cloud-based portal that incorporates flows of real-time data into a collection of maps and dashboards. Tied to shared databases and offline apps built with geographic information system (GIS) technology, the Geospatial Hub was designed to give decision-makers and volunteers a living common operating picture.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It wasn\u2019t exactly ready (\u201cI\u2019m a perfectionist,\u201d she said), but its maps were already helping decision-makers understand what was happening on the ground, and where, in real time. \u201cWe wanted people to have access to our maps for this,\u201d she added.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In Chicago, Traci Rankin and Justin Cronin, Team Rubicon\u2019s deputy directors of mission support and operations, were also on the Geospatial Hub, watching the storm's progression and preparing for a possible full-scale operation. Tracking Melissa\u2019s enormous eye as it cut across the island, they had already decided to dispatch a small medical team. Next, they had to figure out where, and just how bad, the devastation was.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Better geospatial awareness was especially critical because this was relatively new terrain. Team Rubicon, which launched 85 operations in 2025, hadn\u2019t mounted a large-scale international operation in a few years. The group cut its teeth responding to catastrophic earthquakes in Haiti and Chile in 2010 and has since deployed to over 30 countries. But overseas recovery efforts, involving mucking outs, roof tarping, and chainsaw work, can be incredibly expensive. \u201cThere's a lot more planning and logistical support that goes into it,\u201d Williams said, including careful coordination with a range of government agencies, local communities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Those challenges can slow what Williams calls \u201cspeed to need,\u201d a term heard often among the group\u2019s employees and volunteers.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cIt means getting boots on the ground faster, getting help to the people that need it most\u2014as fast as possible\u2014while still making sure that we cover all of our bases on the back end,\u201d Williams said. \u201cIt seems obvious, but it needs to be remembered, repeated.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Building a Common Picture<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The first question for Williams\u2014and for her myriad counterparts across the Jamaican government, its partners, and a growing number of NGOs\u2014was which places were hit hardest and who would be most impacted.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cOne of our big focuses is vulnerable communities,\u201d Williams said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to find those niche populations that are more vulnerable than other populations and probably don't receive the same type of assistance that others do.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Even before landfall, she\u2019d added layers to the map: National Hurricane Center forecasts over population density and flood-prone zones, Social Vulnerability Index data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency\u2019s National Risk Index. She overlaid those with forecasts for the storm's path and areas likely to flood. \u201cThose types of datasets really help us narrow down before we even have people on the ground,\u201d she said.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On another tab, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nhc.noaa.gov\/#Melissa\">National Hurricane Center<\/a> pages dedicated to Melissa kept refreshing to show where the storm was located, while a YouTube feed carried live multi-camera views from the island. In the Overview tab, a big-picture map showed the status of Caribbean airports, the locations of Jamaican hospitals, and Team Rubicon\u2019s other assets, including caches of supplies and the locations of its specialized \"Greyshirt\" volunteers\u2014doctors, nurses, heavy equipment operators, and chainsaw experts.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">By day two, as a dissipated Hurricane Melissa moved over eastern Cuba, a new layer appeared on the basemap, with imagery from Vantor, the satellite giant formerly known as Maxar. A feed from social media platform Factal provided AI-filtered updates on ground conditions.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Meanwhile, volunteer analysts on Williams\u2019s small GIS team collected more social media data, which they added to the map via an ArcGIS Survey123 app or dumped into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for later processing. \u201cSome of the [volunteers] are super good with tech. Some of them, they've never had a Facebook in their life,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">An Incident Dashboard tab, designed to display preliminary damage, drew on data from the Government of Jamaica (GOJ) and the<a href=\"https:\/\/www.napsgfoundation.org\/about\/\"> National Alliance for Public Safety GIS Foundation<\/a> (NAPSG), both of which were already processing field reports from teams of government and NGO volunteers. That data fed into the dashboard and authoritative map layers from the government's geospatial repository. Using WhatsApp, a team of analysts also added geolocated photos of blocked roads and flooded neighborhoods sent in by residents as they began digging out. If you clicked a red dot on the map, which indicated a road blocked by flooding a photo of the damage would pop up.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With that data, \u201cwe were able to get a lay of the land across the country,\u201d Williams said.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"gallery","gallery_images":[771874,771850,771852]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As Jamaicans sought supplies and temporary shelter, Williams and her team could see the numbers ticking up. The devastation was especially heavy around the Westmoreland and Saint Elizabeth parishes, where storm surge, flooding, and high wind gusts from Melissa's eyewall destroyed infrastructure and agriculture and inundated towns. The coastal town of Black River, \u201cwas probably the hardest hit community,\u201d she said.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In studying the grim aerial imagery\u2014along with photos sent in by people who had just lost their homes\u2014Williams recalled the devastation she and her colleagues had seen a year earlier in the wake of Hurricane Helene. Like Melissa, Helene struck hardest in areas that were already extremely vulnerable.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cWe can't go to everybody,\u201d she said. \u201cWhat this helps us do is narrow down pockets of areas that we should prioritize.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When the<a href=\"https:\/\/teamrubiconusa.org\/news-and-stories\/team-rubicon-humanitarian-aid-hurricane-melissa-jamaica\/\"> first four Greyshirts departed<\/a> for Kingston on Thursday, October 30, they carried the Geospatial Hub on their phones via ArcGIS Field Maps, with functions offline when connectivity fails.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cWe have a lot of people that are very much put-a-pin-on-a-map type of people, and they don't like pointing to a computer screen,\u201d Williams said. In addition to printing large maps to hang up at bases, her team equipped volunteers with 8x11 pocket maps for times when they didn't have cell service. Given the devastated telecom infrastructure and heavy demand for limited bandwidth, they often didn\u2019t.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As the four-person team pushed into Westmoreland, Jamaica\u2019s westernmost parish, they used the maps to avoid roadblocks and track both the devastation and the medical response as they encountered injured people. New damage assessments, made using government land and aerial surveys, along with data from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Search and Rescue team, appeared as red dots on the map.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cThat helped us get a sense of what routes to take, what routes we should probably avoid, what portions of the island were most heavily impacted,\u201d Williams said. Within days, the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management in Jamaica had identified about 215,000 damaged buildings across the island\u2014nearly 20 percent of Jamaica\u2019s structures.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">On day three, the team set up a small field operation next to a hospital in Westmoreland to connect with community members and a growing network of NGOs while waiting for government approval to begin cleanup operations.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cThe big thing was the coordination piece,\u201d she said. \u201cWe wanted to make sure that we were coordinating with those local officials as well as with other nonprofits.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As dozens of local agencies, aid groups, and companies got to work, the government\u2019s National Emergency Response GIS Team (NERGIST)\u2014made up of experts from various government agencies, including the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management\u2014worked to coordinate all recovery efforts. It helped that many operations were using the ArcGIS cloud and that Esri\u2019s disaster response team had also mobilized to ease communication and collaboration.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cHaving the partnerships with Esri, it allowed us now to better understand the space in which the humanitarian groups worked and allowed them to understand who to come to for the authoritative data,\u201d said Alicia Edwards, principal director of the National Spatial Data Management Branch of Jamaica. \u201cIt really reduced the guesswork and also helped teams act with confidence, and having that one sort of communication group allowed also for the different initiatives to have greater impact.\u201d<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"gallery","gallery_images":[771843,771847,771875,771840,771876]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h3 style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><strong>Boots on the Ground<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In Chicago, Rankin and Cronin were watching the damage tick up in the dashboards as they planned for a larger deployment. The maps and consultations with health officials pointed them to Savanna-la-Mar Public General Hospital\u2014which Melissa had badly damaged\u2014as the best staging point for a clinic.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">About a week after landfall, a team of 15 Team Rubicon volunteers arrived as part of an <a href=\"https:\/\/teamrubiconusa.org\/news-and-stories\/team-rubicon-receives-emergency-medical-team-type-1-mobile-verification-from-the-world-health-organization\/\">EMT Type-1 Mobile Team<\/a>\u2014registered nurses, paramedics, and logistics members\u2014for a two-week stint. The medical operation lasted longer. Working in coordination with the Ministry of Health and the<a href=\"https:\/\/www.paho.org\/en\"> Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)<\/a>, 59 Greyshirts treated 2,221 patients\u2014many of them with critical wounds\u2014at two clinics between November 6 and December 19.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While preparing for the medical operation, mission planners recognized that the extent of the damage might necessitate a larger response. Soon, another four-person advanced team arrived, composed largely of highly skilled Greyshirt sawyers, who quickly coordinated with officials from the National Works Agency. By mid-November, the first of three teams of 30 volunteers was busy with mucking outs, roof tarping, and general debris removal. As they went, volunteers used the Survey123 app to collect data, feeding a dashboard that tracked on-the-ground work and generated reports for the Government of Jamaica, detailing where work was done and who it impacted.<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":771863,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">David LaRivee, a Greyshirt who also deployed to Haiti in 2010, was grateful that the death toll from Melissa was far lower by comparison.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But \u201cin terms of physical damage, it was comparable,\u201d he said in a Team Rubicon blog. \u201cEntire sections of towns were reduced to rubble. All public services were gone with little hope of a quick restoration.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Team Rubicon volunteers worked through Thanksgiving alongside partners like<a href=\"https:\/\/wck.org\/\"> Jos\u00e9 Andr\u00e9s\u2019s World Central Kitche<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/reel\/DQr2Z7Hj6ra\/?igsh=MTFvcG9hN280MmQ=\">n<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/reel\/DQr2Z7Hj6ra\/?igsh=MTFvcG9hN280MmQ%3D\">Samaritan\u2019s Purse<\/a>, in addition to government workers and local volunteers, many of whom were \u201cdoing so while facing incredible disparities themselves,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/teamrubiconusa.org\/news-and-stories\/in-jamaica-bearing-witness-and-feeling-gratitude\/\">recalled<\/a> Megan Painter, a Team Rubicon nurse.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Three months after Melissa hit, recovery had made dramatic progress. According to government figures, approximately 280,000 people had been reached with humanitarian assistance\u2014including food distributions, hot meals, and cash-based support\u2014as distribution operations wound down.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Still, the costs of the catastrophe continue to mount\u2014102 deaths were attributed to Melissa across the region, including in nearby Haiti, where 43 people died. An aid<a href=\"https:\/\/www.imf.org\/en\/news\/articles\/2025\/12\/01\/pr25400-jamaica-billions-over-3-years-for-recovery-and-reconstruct-after-hurricane-melissa\"> package of up to $6.7 billion<\/a> over three years and an additional $150 million payout from Jamaica\u2019s pioneering <a href=\"https:\/\/www.worldbank.org\/en\/news\/press-release\/2025\/11\/07\/hurricane-melissa-triggers-100-payout-of-150-million-world-bank-catastrophe-bond-for-jamaica\">catastrophe bond<\/a> will help cover part of the losses from the storm, now estimated at more than $9 billion.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Edwards credits the speed and strength of the response to an outpouring of help from overseas volunteers, informed by rapid, on-the-ground geospatial assessments that \u201chelped us know where the destruction happened most,\u201d she said. \u201cI didn't know we had so many friends, but we do.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In advance of the next disaster, Williams is focused on building out Team Rubicon\u2019s GIS Cadre. A GIS disaster-response volunteer can build maps, dashboards, and operational analyses about Team Rubicon\u2019s responses, as well as related apps and ArcGIS StoryMaps stories. As she continues developing the Geospatial Hub, Williams wants to see it incorporated into planning and executing all the group\u2019s operations.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Geospatial Hub and its related apps already give leaders a clearer visual of where exactly teams are and the scale of their impact during disasters. Alongside \u201cspeed to need,\u201d keeping costs low remains a constant priority, especially amid a tumultuous economic and philanthropic landscape.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cWe have to be really specific with how we spend our donor dollars,\u201d Williams said. Team Rubicon calls it the \"<em>Your Mother's a Donor\"<\/em> principle\u2014spending every dollar as carefully as if one's own mother donated it. \u201cThere's no guarantee that when there\u2019s another disaster, that we can fundraise for it.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Still, record-breaking storms will keep coming.<\/p>\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cIn a world of climate change,\u201d she said, \u201cthere <em>is<\/em> a guarantee.\u201d<\/p>\r\n&nbsp;\r\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Explore how\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/industries\/emergency-management\/overview?rmedium=www_esri_com_EtoF&amp;rsource=\/en-us\/industries\/state-local-government\/solutions\/emergency-management\">GIS supports emergency operations<\/a>\u00a0before, during, and after a storm.<\/p>"}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Team Rubicon Mounted One of Its Biggest Aid Efforts in Jamaica<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"When Hurricane Melissa devastated Jamaica, Team Rubicon showed how geospatial technology can turn disaster chaos into coordinated action.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/team-rubicon-hurricane-melissa-aid-effort\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How High-Tech Maps Helped Team Rubicon Mount One of Its Biggest Aid Efforts\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When Hurricane Melissa devastated Jamaica, Team Rubicon showed how geospatial technology can turn disaster chaos into coordinated action.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" 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