When Hurricane Helene hit the east coast in 2024, it proved that organizations must be capable of managing physical disruption along with information complexity in real time.
Just prior to Helene making landfall in Florida, the Disasters Response Coordination System (DRCS) team published data—including maps of landslide hazard probability, precipitation totals, and soil moisture conditions—to help responders prepare for and respond to the storms’ impact.
NASA further highlighted that disaster response during Helene depended heavily on near real-time flood detection, power outage mapping, daily coordination calls, centralized data-sharing, and continuous updates. NASA’s teams worked directly with FEMA and emergency managers to provide mapping and Earth observation data that informed decision-making during the storm response.
However, researchers evaluating the hurricane’s disaster response found disruptions in the quality, source, quantity, and channel of data—referred to as “information voids.” These communication gaps severely hindered public access to emergency resources and allowed harmful rumors to circulate among displaced populations.
These “information voids” were realized as:
This is precisely why many leaders are reevaluating disaster preparedness through a broader lens; not simply “Can systems stay online?” but rather “Can people access trusted information quickly enough to keep operations moving?”
Helene’s information voids have enterprise parallels. Quantity, quality, source, and channel gaps can show up as missing inventory, inconsistent metadata, unclear ownership, and systems that are unavailable when teams need them most.
For information professionals and IT leaders, disaster preparedness starts with the same question emergency responders face: can people get trusted information quickly enough to act?
A quantity void happens when teams do not have enough information to make timely decisions. In an enterprise, that may mean incomplete inventories, unknown paper holdings, undocumented repositories, or critical records scattered across shared drives, legacy systems, and vendor portals.
Leaders should consider which records are essential during disruption, where they live, how current the inventory is, and whether teams can identify gaps before an emergency. Contracts, insurance records, HR files, financial documents, patient records, procurement documentation, and compliance evidence should not be discovered mid-crisis.
A useful preparedness exercise is to identify the records that would be needed in the first 24 hours, the first week, and the first month after disruption. That helps teams separate essential information from everything else and prioritize what must be indexed, digitized, protected, or made easier to retrieve.
Information can exist and still fail the business. Poor-quality records, inconsistent indexing, unclear file names, missing metadata, duplicate versions, or hard-to-read scans slow down retrieval and create doubt.
During a disruption, teams do not have time to investigate whether “final_v3,” “final_FINAL,” or “signed copy” is the record they should use. They need clarity. They need enough context to know what the record is, whether it is complete, whether it is current, who owns it, and whether it can be shared.
Leaders should assess whether records are searchable, complete, properly labeled, and connected to retention requirements. They should also define who validates record quality, how metadata standards are applied, and where manual processes create room for error.
A source void occurs when people lack a clear, authoritative source for what is happening or what they should do next. During Helene, limited trusted sources made it harder for residents to verify local conditions. In an enterprise, source voids appear when several teams maintain different versions of a record, when no one owns the official file, or when people do not know which system should be treated as the source of truth.
Business leaders should identify systems of record, assign ownership, and make approval paths clear. Audit trails, access controls, retention schedules, and documented change history help teams trust what they retrieve, especially when decisions carry legal, financial, or compliance consequences.
Helene also showed how quickly communication channels can break. Enterprise systems face the same risk when access depends on one building, one application, one network, or one person.
Business leaders should test information access under realistic conditions. What happens if the main office is closed? What if the legacy system still runs, but only one person knows how to retrieve what is needed? What if physical records are safe, but transportation is limited?
Preparedness may involve secure offsite storage, digitization of high-value records, scan-on-demand workflows, cloud-based archives, role-based access, alternate retrieval processes, and clear escalation paths. The point is to avoid having a single access route for information that the business needs to keep operating.
Hurricanes pass, but the information problems they expose can last much longer. Prepared organizations treat information as part of operational infrastructure. They know what they have, keep it usable, assign clear ownership, and make access resilient across systems, teams, and locations.
For teams reviewing their preparedness plans, the Access Business Continuity and Preparedness Resource Hub offers planning materials, disaster-specific resources, and guidance for preparing for, responding to, and recovering from events such as hurricanes. Use it as a starting point to assess where your continuity plan is strong, where information access may still be fragile, and what should be addressed before the next disruption tests your organization.
Share