Data-driven decision-making in the face of catastrophe

Big data can mean big business. But as Texas copes with the destruction of Hurricane Harvey, which ravaged the state late last month, and with Irma barreling over the Caribbean toward Florida, and Mexico shaken by the most powerful earthquake in 100 years, can mining vast amounts of data also help save lives from the fury of natural disasters? Find and rescue victims from rubble? Governments are looking to the same sophisticated analytics techniques that are predicting -- with fast-improving accuracy -- the paths and destruction potential of increasingly fearsome storms to better prepare for and tend to their constituents' needs during calamities. But whether such data-driven decision-making is actually making a difference is, in 2017, an open question.