How do you plan and prepare for a post-disaster assessment in advance?

You need to identify what you need to assess. When conducting damage assesments, the most important item is to have pre-disaster details (imagery of some form). For my specifc work, that means having good pre-imagery before a disaster hits. We leverage newly acquired remote sensing data (satellite, airborne, ground based, etc.) post disaster, and then make assessments of the damage for FEMA. It's critical to understand what you are going to accomplish use to accomplish this.

Preparing is one of many steps that can either make or break you in a disaster situation. A good rule of thumb from previous years of experience is that "No one is coming, and your on your own!" The mental aspect of the situation plays a crucial role for those in a beyond basis disaster.

So preparing for Post-disasters is really no different than preparing for pre-disaster and disaster actions. The process for planning for and preparing for post disaster actions is called the Continuity of Operations Plans (Coop). Within this process you are supposed to look at everything you will need to continue operations after a disaster. Not enough people/organizations do this.

Having a primary, secondary, and a tertiary anything in regards to tools, communications, ect will increase your chances of coming out on top of a situation that's other than ordinary. All levels of government to include state and federal agencies use this in order to maintain some order when disaster strikes.

This is also critical, common tools used are ESRI ArcGIS, ground based apps such as QuickCapture or Survey123; we've also used Google Maps, Google Earth, for search and rescue, SARCop, SARTopo, CALTopo, and other types of mapping tools. There are dozens of different tools and capabilities for doing this. You also need to teach and then train people to use these tools.

This is about collaboration and understanding who is in the emergency management landscape. It's a challenge, ex. for Wildfire, the entire US government is involved in the mission. People may not be aware, but seriously, every single agency, except the Dept of Education has some role in Wildfire. This goes all the way to Congress and the Whitehouse. There is massive duplication in this arena, you have to remember when trying to understand everyone, there are numerous areas, again for wildfire, there is Gov't, research orgs, commercial companies, associations, education, global programs, networks, etc. It's a massive list, and that is just some of the areas. The challenge is knowing who to call and when.

This depends on how the assessments are done. Geospatial damage assessments are made sitting safely in your home or at work. For in-person collection using hand-tools, then security, safety conditions, etc. all are important to take into account. Also what type of information/data are you trying to collect and how detailed, do you just want to know a structure was affected-destroyed by an event, or do you need to know exactly how high the water was in a flood using high-water marks. This will determine the optimum method for collecting the info and what support or equipment you may need.

This is highly important. In disasters, emotion plays a huge component. You need to have objective requirements for how you define the damage you are trying to assess. Ex. If you have a whole in your roof, FEMA only considers it to be minor damage. You could lose all your shingles, but that is only affected. You need to train your folks to know the difference, otherwise they will make assumptions or decisions based on how they would "feel about it." If you lost most of your roof in a tornado, I'd say my house is destroyed, but in reality it may just be considered major damage. You also need to enforce how ground data is collected to prevent duplication or over-counting.