After the superstorm, Lauren Talbot’s software helped clear city streets. 
Marton Perlaki
When Hurricane Sandy hit New York, a city driver navigated the darkened, flooded streets to get Lauren Talbot, then chief programmer at the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, to Brooklyn. That’s where the Office of Emergency Management had set up headquarters, and Talbot had some coding to do.
Anxious New Yorkers were clogging 911 lines with thousands of reports of downed trees, and as harried operators logged the details for the parks department, their computers cut off each address at 26 characters. Talbot came to the rescue: In a 10-hour hackathon with another programmer, the 26-year-old created a Python program that completed the location info so the city could clear the roadways.
For Talbot, a Stanford grad who came to her city job by way of Craigslist, it was all in a day’s work. Every mess is an opportunity to improve an increasingly data-driven city. “I can read about a problem that matters to people I see on the subway,” she says, “then come into work and impact the situation.” Now that’s power computing.
