Christina Moore of Tempest-GEMS illustration

This blog was originally published on March 30, 2022.

When Christina Moore’s hometown in the mountains of Southern Vermont got hit by category one Hurricane Irene in 2011, her community was not prepared.

“We don’t get them that often,” says Moore. “The last one, I think, that hit that hard here was the 1938 New England Hurricane.”

With 30 years of experience in emergency services, public health, crisis management, and software development, Moore is the founder of Storm Petrel, LLC, providing emergency management consulting and data management services to clients since 2006. But even her team was not prepared to manage the data for a natural disaster of that scale with the tools that were available, she said.

Moore’s hometown would not be alone in this. In that year alone, the National Centers for Environmental Information recorded 16 natural disasters in the United States, totaling $85.6 billion dollars in damage. As a seasoned emergency manager and software developer, Moore imagined what kinds of technological solutions could help organizations rebuild their communities after such costly destruction by showing them how to navigate complex grant environments, track finances, collect required documents, and ensure their use of funds adheres to federal procurement law.

Only a year later, the concept would meet a serious real-world need after yet another devasting event—Hurricane Sandy—struck the region. Moore was invited to work with the City of New York at the time, helping agencies, such as the Office of the Mayor, manage their claims with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Moore noticed how much room there was for improvement when it came to managing three things: the data, dollars, and documents for disaster recovery grants.

The Tempest-GEMS app, built on Oracle APEX, helps local governments and environmental organizations manage the data, dollars, and documents for disaster recovery grants.

The impact of two back-to-back destructive hurricanes inspired the development of the Tempest-GEMS app. Built on Oracle APEX, the app helps local governments and environmental organizations track government requirements for financial recovery following natural disasters. There are numerous, complex laws related to these grants, and effectively tracking the requirements helps ensure that aid is efficiently delivered to those in need.

“We are trying to improve the transparency and the management of federal tax dollars that are being used for the public good,” says Moore. “Preventing fraud, waste, and abuse is a really big part of what we’re doing.”

Growth due to global need

With her Hurricane Sandy experience in mind, Moore started working with Storm Petrel LLC Chief Technology Officer John Glezen on the concept for Tempest-GEMS.

The process for applying for federal disaster relief is regulated by federal law. Mistakes can result in a withdrawal or removal of granted funds and even jail time if the federal government can prove any type of fraud or personal gain from misuse. “The most enduring challenge of managing federal grant money is that the process is complex,” says Moore. “The challenge was to make a complex and nonlinear process smooth and self-guided in web-based software.”

Moore and her team piloted the Tempest-GEMS app in local communities and municipalities to track the steps in the grant application process, store data and documents, and manage money. This smaller-scale rollout allowed the team to refine the app so it would be ready for use when the stakes were higher.

“We are trying to improve the transparency and the management of federal tax dollars that are being used for the public good. Preventing fraud, waste, and abuse is a really big part of what we’re doing.”
—Christina Moore, CEO and Founder of Storm Petrel, LLC

That advance work paid off. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, Storm Petrel got the call. They arrived in Puerto Rico just 10 days after the hurricane struck and immediately ran the application as they worked side-by-side with the Government of Puerto Rico to help establish recovery processes and disaster response. Within a few months, approximately 2,000 users were on the app. By the time recovery was in full swing and grant money was flowing toward projects to rebuild Puerto Rico, the system was tracking $5 billion in relief. At this scale, that meant having the capacity to manage more than 400,000 digital documents required by the federal government, such as completed contracts and proof of payment.

Their work wouldn’t end there. Last year in Vermont, they expanded to doing grant management for an even greater event that struck the entire world—the COVID-19 pandemic.

The app’s aim is to simplify the management of federal dollars following the massive funding hospitals and health organizations received for COVID response. It will be critical for them to accurately report back to the federal government and funding agencies on how resources were being used to close the books and avoid massive tax increases, Moore adds.

Christina Moore, CEO and Founder of Storm Petrel, LLC

Christina Moore, founder of Storm Petrel, LLC emergency management consulting services, used Oracle APEX to help agencies and organizations track the requirements for financial recovery following natural disasters.

“We want hospitals and state health organizations to be reimbursed for everything that they’ve done for us, but if they don’t provide the receipts, the labor reports and all that minutia, we could run into some problems and those problems mean that the local taxpayers have to cover that bill,” says Moore. “Our tool is here to prevent that by having checklists, having signposts, telling you what information to fill in.”

Flexible on location, language, and scale

Having established their work on major events, such as Hurricane Maria and the COVID-19 pandemic, Moore’s team has harnessed other capabilities within the application.

One thing Moore’s team loves about the Oracle stack, she says, is the ability to scale minute-by-minute, so the app can adjust to how many users it’s serving. This feature became critical during the increasing need for relief management both during and after the hurricane in Puerto Rico.

Configuring the app to different languages is also a native feature to Oracle APEX. By doing a translation process on the app, a preferred language can be selected upon logging in, which proved to be an extremely useful capability when serving those affected by Hurricane Maria.

“The joy of that experience was that we were translated fully in Spanish and English and providing technical support simultaneously in both languages,” says Moore. “We wanted to speak to people who needed to be heard and speak to them in their own language. We thought ‘Why not? Let’s respect and honor that.’”

Moore’s team is continuing this work, having spent the last nine months doing applications in Europe where they are supporting multiple languages simultaneously. They are also in contract with the state of New Mexico doing both security and FEMA grant work for their Homeland Security and Emergency Management agency.

“When it comes to the management of federal dollars, we want states, counties, and everyone else to be able to justify every single dollar and provide perfect accounting for how they used those dollars,” says Moore. “We’re trying to help people simply do a better job at something that is complicated.”

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Illustration: Wes Rowell
Photography: Corey Hendrickson/Getty Images for Oracle