Disaster Humanitarian · Ordinary People
Andrew Ngui put sixty people and a drone over the same neighborhood, just to see which was faster
Andrew Ngui, Joshua Jeffrey, Geoff Hinkle · Kansas City, MO, USA
After a storm, Kansas City counts damaged homes on paper, door to door, before federal aid can move. Andrew Ngui spent one March morning testing whether drones and an AI model could do that count, with about sixty ground assessors working the same blocks as the control.
The person and the place
Andrew Ngui is chief digital officer for Kansas City, Missouri, which GovTech measures at about 319 square miles of ground to check after a bad storm.
The problem Andrew cared about
Federal aid does not move until the city files a preliminary damage assessment with FEMA, and that assessment has been a paper exercise. The city trains staff and volunteers in disaster management, then sends them out on foot to work the damaged blocks, one house at a time. "Versus always being caught like a deer in the headlights," Ngui told KSHB. "That's really the heart of it."
The agency moment
On March 23, 2026, Ngui's office ran the question as a simulation, on a day when no storm had hit and nothing was at stake. The city flew its own drones over one neighborhood, and about sixty people worked the same ground the old way at the same time, so there would be two results to hold up against each other. Joshua Jeffrey, program manager for Bellwether, the Google X team whose model read the images, described the handoff plainly: "The city is flying their own drones, they'll capture images of homes and then we access those images to see how much damage was done." Kansas City's emergency management coordinator, Geoff Hinkle, brought in city fire and police, Platte County, and the National Weather Service.
What changed, with evidence
Ngui's team pointed the model at one narrow job, sorting what the drones saw into FEMA's damage scale of one to five. By Bellwether's own count, processing that imagery took about 23 minutes in this scenario, and the model landed within one number on the scale 96 percent of the time. Those are the tool team's figures rather than an outside measurement, and Google paid for the project, which is worth saying out loud. What nobody has to take on faith is the shape of the morning: one neighborhood, two methods, sixty people on the ground, and a city that now has its own look at what it would be choosing between.
The move worth copying
Ngui says the exercise could help create a playbook for other cities. Know someone at a city hall who tested the new way against the old way before anybody's roof was actually gone? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"Because it's not just about the damage; it's about really restoring people's lives as quickly as possible to the status quo." — Andrew Ngui, to Government Technology
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