Every day, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) compiles a PDF report they call the “Daily Operations Briefing.”
To the Data Liberation Project’s best knowledge, FEMA does not publish these briefings anywhere online. You can, however, subscribe to receive a link to each day’s briefing. (You can also find past briefings at disastercenter.com, which has been collecting the reports for many years.)
The lack of an official, public-facing source for FEMA reports provides the motivation for this repository, which is the first step in what will be a more comprehensive processing pipeline.
Using the service kill-the-newsletter.com, the Data Liberation Project has subscribed to FEMA’s Daily Operations Briefing emails. The service receives each email and makes its contents available as a private RSS feed.
That feed’s address, however, must remain private; if it were public, someone could unsubscribe it from the newsletter and/or send spam to the inbox. So...
To make the information in the inbox publicly accessible without compromising the inbox itself, the scripts/convert.py Python script does the following:
- Fetches the private RSS feed.
- Extracts the necessary, non-private information: the time the email was received, the name of the PDF, and a link to the PDF file.
- Writes a new, reformatted RSS feed, which is available as
output/feed.rss.
The (public and private) RSS feeds only contain the most recent 42 entries. The scripts/historify.py script iterates through this git/GitHub repository’s history and generates a file of all unique entries, which is available as output/history.csv.
- An apparent
kill-the-newsletter.comoutage resulted in missing emails/entries for January 11–13, 2023.
The code in this repository is available under the MIT License; the output files are available under the CC0 license.
Email Jeremy Singer-Vine at [email protected].