Written by Benjamin Freed
With a death toll of 102 and counting, and estimated economic losses of more than $67 billion, Hurricane Ian may go down as the deadliest hurricane in Florida history. And since Ian made landfall near Fort Myers on Sept. 28, continuing to cut a swath across the state, it’s a major concern for Florida Chief Information Officer Jamie Grant.
In an interview this week at the National Association of State CIOs conference in Louisville, Kentucky, Grant — who said he spent the days since Ian huddled with other state officials inside an emergency operations center in Tallahassee — said Florida Digital Service played a leading role in bringing critical services to hurricane-ravaged areas and helping residents locate missing family members and neighbors.
While Florida has decades of experience to lean on when it comes to hurricanes, Grant said the response after Ian was different because of the heavy involvement of the Florida Digital Service, a two-year-old agency created at the end of many IT state reorganizations.
“It’s kind of organized chaos,” Grant said. “I think it’s been interesting, because I think it’s the first response that has had a real digital component.”
From the beginning, Grant’s staff sought to handle all the data coming in regarding missing persons reports and requests for search-and-rescue operations, especially as the Category 4 hurricane was immediately shut down 911 service in Lee County, which includes Fort Myers .
“As a result, emails flooded the search-and-rescue emergency support function to the point that their inbox was almost unmanageable,” Grant said. “So we were brought in to solve that problem.”
That initial response led to the creation of a website, missing.fl.gov, where the state collects reports on individuals who need to be located.
“That’s a way for us to communicate with our constituents … to give us information to help us assist in direct search and rescue,” Grant said.
Florida Digital Service has also set up a second website, safe.fl.gov, to report safe finds.
Lost and safe
When he spoke with StateScoop on Tuesday night, Grant had just finished a twice-daily update on the number of missing and found people. Of the 25,835 households where someone was reported missing, nearly 90% responded to phone calls, text messages or other forms of contact, and of those respondents, Grant said nearly 99% did report themselves as “safe.”
Florida officials used a variety of methods to contact people during the storm. The most serious cases are handled by search-and-rescue teams, followed by reports from hospitals and shelters. But many were contacted by taking location data from an emergency operations platform called SARCOP — which Grant said was new to him — and running it against records in the state’s ServiceNow digital workflow platform. .
“We took all those waypoints, we took those, turned those into addresses, combined that with our ServiceNow records to start clearing the records, either by someone who respond to the AI that we deploy from the contact center, they go back to safe .fl.gov and say they’re safe, or they’re a waypoint we’ve been to,” he said.
Grant said another team used geographic information systems technology to visualize missing persons reports down to the household level.
Largest Starlink outside the war zone
In addition to creating platforms to locate missing people, Florida Digital Service is also working to help restore internet access to the affected area using Starlink, the SpaceX subsidiary that uses swarms of low-orbit satellites to provide internet connection. Grant said the state has negotiated with Starlink to provide emergency internet service to election administrators in case of Election Day outages.
“Fortunately, when it happened, we had contacts at a fairly senior level,” Grant said. “We quickly started having rolling shipments to the logistics staging area in Lee County.”
Grant said the Starlink network currently serving South Florida is the company’s largest network in the world outside Ukraine, where the company’s satellites provide service to the country as it fights Russian aggression.
In Florida, Starlink has been used to provide connectivity to hospitals, supermarkets, pharmacies and other critical businesses, though Grant said what qualifies as essential is sometimes disputed.
“Someone came to me at the EOC and said, ‘Hey, Bealls’” — a local chain of clothing stores — “’you want Starlink and we know they’re not critical industry, but it’s like, can we give them Starlink? ‘” Grant said. “I said, ‘Guys, all these people are gone. Clothing is critical. Turn it on.'”
‘You can save someone’s life’
Grant said he was scheduled to visit the storm-ravaged area on Friday, giving him a chance to see the work of his relatively small team up close. Many of the digital products Florida Digital Service has created since Hurricane Ian hit — including the missing and safe websites — have been adapted from code originally developed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said the goal is to help hurricane victims, especially elderly residents, get to safety and better get through processes like filing insurance claims, without having to wait for a physical line for hours.
“The traditional elements of physical recovery, I don’t know that anyone does better than Florida,” he said. “I don’t know that there is a blueprint for a digital response other than good digital design and doing things that we normally do. But there’s a role to play for digital, because if we can avoid a firefighter having or law enforcement fish and wildlife officer having to go into a life-threatening situation to check and see if someone needs rescuing, because it can be said Let’s see if someone says they’re safe, you might not only save the life of someone who’s looking for help, you might save the life of someone who’s in a life-threatening situation.”