For more than a century, the U.S. Geological Survey has delivered the straight-up science needed to navigate natural hazards—but not anymore. When it comes to dispatching science in and ahead of a crisis, the times are a-changin’.

“We’re increasingly moving—in order to make the information the most useful and usable that it can be—moving from a sort of traditional area of hazard assessment into more risk based information,” USGS Associate Director for Natural Hazards David Applegate recently said in his keynote speech at the 36th Annual Natural Hazards Workshop. “The bureaucracy of the USGS is changing and it’s changing in a way that has the potential to be beneficial for our ability to be effective in the hazards arena.”

A restructuring of the organization by strategic areas, rather than areas of scientific expertise, is among those changes, Applegate said.

“For 130 years the survey was organized by where you got your degree,” he told attendees. “We had a geology discipline, a mapping discipline, a water resources discipline. Now we’re organized in these mission areas … natural hazards being one of those.”

Now that the Survey is “undisciplined,” more attention can be paid to strategic areas: climate and land use change; core science systems; ecosystems; energy and minerals and environmental health; water; and of course, natural hazards.

The natural hazards mission area is responsible for coastal and marine geology, earthquake hazards, geomagnetism, global seismographic networks, landslides, and volcanoes. It also coordinates information across all hazards and facilitates USGS response activities after an event.

The natural hazards mission includes advancing hazards understanding, developing monitoring and communications infrastructure, characterizing hazards, assessing risk, and improving forecasting. The USGS already has statutory responsibility for keeping citizens informed of earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions, and provides support that allows other programs—such NOAA’s tsunami alert system—to meet their responsibilities as well.

Even with so much on its plate, the natural hazards mission of the USGS has taken a new approach to providing “richer information that will be actionable by the emergency responders,” Applegate said.

A suite of products fits that goal, including ShakeMaps, the newly improved PAGER earthquake assessment system, and the Volcano Disaster Assistance Program. But even as these do a better job giving people the resources they need than ever before, it’s the recent spate of demonstration products—the Great ShakeOut scenarios and ARkStorm— that really embody the new approach, Applegate said.

“This whole notion is about trying to do a better job of delivering our information in such a way that we can help people improve resilience in communities,” he said. “Trying to take hazard information and then build upon that to make the hazards real enough to be able to think about the possible, not just the probable, and play it all out to be able to look at the consequences. When we asked at the outset of this project what do emergency managers want, this was the top thing that they wanted”

The scenario approach has been wildly successful in bringing together a lot of people of differing expertise—from the man on the street to first responders to transportation and utility crews—to examine what’s going to happen in their area of responsibility when disaster strikes. The end result is hopefully a bigger, clearer picture than any one discipline could have provided alone.

“We have a lot of geoscientists in our midst but we do also have capabilities beyond that, but we particularly need to reach out and that’s what this has been about,” Applegate said. “Getting the earth science information, the engineering information, the social science information and putting together the building blocks of a scenario like this.”

More scenarios, including a tsunami and a wildfire scenario, are in the works. And as the USGS begins creating 10-year science strategies for each mission area, it looks like there’s no going back to the your-father’s-geological survey way of thinking. After all, Applegate said, the risk reduction approach just makes sense.

“We know that in science and crisis the best thing you can do is what you do ahead of the crisis,” he said. “The interest here is can we do that outside the crisis, because after all to do it within the crisis is about the worst possible time.”