brb writing a darkly comic near-future SF novel where FEMA and NOAA and USGS got junked and all the actual disaster and weather experts went to work logistics at fast casual restaurant chains
WTF. The electric company in Texas doesn't have a map of outages so people have been using the Whataburger App to figure out who lost power.
This is like when Homer was using the Krusty Burger map when they got lost at sea.
Everyone I know who wrote near-future SF has switched, because it was just too depressing to see your worst-case predictions for 30 years in the future show up in the early stages in the present. Easier to write about dragons or spaceships.
