The past year has seen some of the most intense natural disasters hit the U.S. and other regions. Now, startups are focusing on advanced technology to help governments and businesses better prepare and prevent destruction.

CGTN’s Mark Niu reports.

When natural disasters like Hurricane Harvey strike, scientists and engineers at the Pacific Disaster Center in Hawaii work feverishly to track thousands of data sources to assess the severity.

Executive director Ray Shirkhodai said, in the case of Harvey, some of the damage could have been prevented. The center is teaming up with Silicon Valley-based Kaazing, to create DisasterAware – software that aims to help businesses access tools that were previously only in the hands of a few.

In the recent California wildfires, authorities constantly questioned whether it was too alarmist to send out blanket text message alerts to everyone in particular areas.

As a result, many people said they didn’t know to leave until fire was literally at their door.

With DisasterAware, businesses can set alert zones to track their assets and easily view the intensity of ongoing fires, like this one in Portland.

Users can even access hundreds of traffic cameras from around the world. In today’s society, these bright spots are of utmost importance,social media flareups.

“Sometimes in situations that are not natural disasters but are things that are manmade like terrorist attacks, the thing that shows the incident the earliest is a Twitter flare. So we can tell and expose on a geospatial map where there’s a sudden increase in Twitter traffic coming from a specific area,” Kaazing CEO, Bob Miller said.

Kaazing is busy doing final tests on DisasterAware, which will hit the market for businesses within the next few months. A simpler version of their software – the Disaster Alert app — is already available to any mobile user wishing to stay on top of the dangers that surround us.