DARCI is a disaster awareness and preparedness program developed by the Disaster Readiness Center of West Kentucky. The effort aims to connect communities and provide them with important disaster recovery knowledge, skills, and tools. Now, the program is looking to expand their services to central and eastern Kentucky over the next few years.
Ryan Drane, principal of Blue Sky Global and DARCI, said he started the initiative because of the lack of resources meant to help victims after a disaster.
“When I started as the director of the long term recovery group, we had about 4,000 households in Graves County that we had to go through, and I sat down with the more than 60 or 70 partner organizations that showed up at our doorstep, and were wonderful, and I said, “where’s the program that we can help to lead these folks through recovery?” And there wasn’t one. One didn’t exist,” said Drane.
DARCI works to prepare communities by collaborating with local leadership to establish civic infrastructure related to long term disaster recovery. The program works to establish a long-term recovery group center prior to the occurrence of a disaster. Drane said the initiative is people driven, putting power in the hands of communities.
“During activation, it’s activated locally. So, you don’t have to wait on the state or a federal declaration. Over 80 percent of disasters that happen in this country are not federally declared, and those people face the same challenges and the same impacts as the people that are in federally declared disasters. It changes their lives just the same,” said Drane.
DARCI provides three core platforms across a desktop and mobile app. They pertain to citizen profiles, organization profiles, and center profiles for long term recovery groups. The platforms provide a secure digital lockbox for important documents which could be lost in disasters, real time interactive maps, emergency alerts and updates for disaster areas, and live dashboards for resource requests and deployment. The initiative also has a website where people and organizations can register to become DARCI certified.