One thing that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has gotten good at, beside distributing ice following a disaster, is tracking the status of the disaster from a claims perspective and sharing that information.
You can track the Hurricane Sandy Recovery at their FEMA website. If you are a citizen and wonder about the number DR-4085, that is the disaster number given to Sandy. Every Presidentially Declared Disaster gets a number and in the recovery business the disaster is referred to by the number, not the name of the hurricane or town hit by a tornado. With many events crossing jurisdictional boundaries it is an easy way to aggregate the information about this one disaster event.
Interestingly my old boss, Mike Byrne is the Federal Coordinating Officer (FCO) for New York City, his home town. They have a picture of him at the above site.
