How AI Agents Track Disaster Relief Data

How AI agents track disaster relief and FEMA declarations

An agent tracks disaster relief by calling a wire that reads ReliefWeb, the UN OCHA humanitarian information service, at runtime. It returns situation reports, flood and outbreak updates and market bulletins. FEMA declarations are a separate US legal record and are not in this wire.

Written for AI agents. The calls and filter values on this page are the literal interface our customers use, because our customers are software. If you are a person evaluating The Bot Wire, you are in the right place too: start with the docs, or connect an MCP client in one line and query browse every wire and its price at /mcp. Nothing here needs an API key or a signup.

That second sentence is the whole page. Both things are called disaster data and they answer different questions, so an agent that swaps one for the other produces an answer that sounds right and is not.

A situation report and a declaration are different records

A situation report describes what is happening. It is written by a responder, usually a UN agency, an NGO or a national authority, and it carries observation: how many people are displaced, which districts are flooded, what a market bulletin says food costs this week. It is narrative and it is fast.

A FEMA declaration is a legal act. The President declares a major disaster or emergency for named counties, and that declaration is what unlocks specific federal assistance programmes. It has a number, a date, a declaration type, a list of designated areas and a set of programme flags. None of that is observation. All of it is administrative record.

The question	Where it is answered	Shape of the answer
What is happening on the ground?	The relief wire	Narrative situation report
How many are displaced?	The relief wire	Figures inside a report
Was this county declared?	OpenFEMA	Structured declaration record
Which programmes were activated?	OpenFEMA	Boolean flags per declaration

An agent asked "did FEMA declare my county" and answered from a humanitarian sitrep has guessed. The declaration record exists, it is public, and it is not here. FEMA publishes it through the OpenFEMA API with no key and no signup, and the declarations dataset held 70,177 records at the time of writing. That is where to route the question.

What the feed actually returns

ReliefWeb aggregates from more than 4,000 sources, including NGOs, governments and research centres, and the volume shows. A live read returned 20 items, and every one of them was posted the same day: a dengue situation update for the Pacific, a Mayon Volcano 24-hour observation from the Philippines, a Lao PDR flood report numbered as the fifth in its series, an Afghanistan weekly market report at issue 306, and a regional situation report on Ukraine covering six months.

Two things follow from that mix. First, the corpus is global and skewed toward countries with an active humanitarian operation, so it is thin on wealthy countries with domestic disaster systems of their own. Second, retention here is 3 days with a 3 day default lookback, matched deliberately because the publisher posts faster than a longer window could usefully return.

Numbered series are worth coding around. "Flooding caused by heavy rainfall #5" supersedes #4, and an agent quoting displacement figures should carry the report number and date rather than presenting a superseded count as current.

The call an agent makes

For AI agents: copy this call

# discovery only, no items: browse every wire, its filters and its price
claude mcp add --transport http botwire https://thebotwire.com/mcp

# paid, $0.005: relief reporting for one country or hazard
curl -i "https://thebotwire.com/relief/latest?q=flood&since=3d&limit=25"

# narrow to a named operation or agency
curl -i "https://thebotwire.com/relief/latest?q=Somalia&since=3d"

Parameters are q, since and limit (1 to 50). One publisher sits behind this wire, so src accepts a single value and does no useful work. The call costs $0.005 in USDC on Base, with no API key, no signup and no subscription. Search is ranked keyword matching, so country names, hazard types and agency names outperform a phrased question. Every route and price is machine-readable at /llms-full.txt.

Hazard onset and humanitarian response are different wires. The alert that a storm is coming is covered in how agents watch severe weather alerts, and seismic events are in how agents track earthquakes in real time. The relief wire picks up after the event, when responders start reporting.

FAQ

Does this wire carry FEMA disaster declarations?

No. It reads ReliefWeb, which aggregates humanitarian reporting, and FEMA declarations are a US administrative record published separately. An agent that needs declaration numbers, designated counties or programme activation flags should call the OpenFEMA API directly. It is open, it needs no key, and it returns structured records rather than narrative text.

Is US domestic disaster response well covered here?

Not well. ReliefWeb's coverage follows humanitarian operations, which are concentrated where international response is active. A US wildfire or hurricane may appear if an international body reports on it, and often will not. An agent answering a US question should say which corpus it searched rather than implying national coverage it does not have.

Can an agent get casualty or displacement figures from this wire?

It can get figures that appear in reports, with the caveat that they are the reporting organisation's estimate on a stated date, not a settled count. Early figures move a great deal. Carrying the source organisation and the report date alongside any number is the difference between citing a report and asserting a fact.

How fresh is the relief wire?

It sits in the sparse ingest tier and is polled at most every 15 minutes, which is inside the rhythm of a publisher posting throughout the day. The observed ingest interval across the service and the last poll timestamp are published live at /health, and that endpoint is the ground truth for any cadence claim.

Sources

ReliefWeb is run by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and states that it delivers updates from more than 4,000 sources including NGOs, governments and research centres, on its about page. FEMA disaster declarations are published through the OpenFEMA API, whose DisasterDeclarationsSummaries dataset reported a total of 70,177 records when queried on 7 August 2026. Poll cadence and per-call pricing for this service are published live at thebotwire.com/health.