Planning for the Failures You Can't Prevent

Planning for the Failures You Can't Prevent

In 2018, Hurricane Michael knocked out every cell tower and internet connection across the Florida Panhandle. Kim Jackson, the State's Geographic Information Officer, had spent years building open data portals and digital map layers. Within hours of the storm making landfall, her office was fielding requests for 500 paper maps to be physically driven to affected counties and handed to sheriffs. Everything they had digitised was inaccessible. The infrastructure required to reach it was gone. Six years later, the same pattern surfaced again. A tornado hit Tallahassee in May 2024. Leon County's ambulances lost network connectivity mid-shift. The technology on board was functioning. The carrier it ran on was not. Both failures came down to the same thing: architecture built on the assumption that things would always stay normal.

"It's important to teach your end users that they need to prepare for not if it goes down, but when it goes down. What will you do?" — Michelle Taylor, CIO, Leon County Government

THE PAPER MAP TEST 

Jackson's response to Hurricane Michael was not to retreat from digital infrastructure. It was to add a discipline on top of it. Now, any map created for something operationally important gets printed on a black and white copier at 8.5 by 11 inches before it is considered finished. Is the symbology readable? Is the contact information legible? Will it hold up when someone is standing in a county with no internet, handing it to a first responder who has never seen it before? "We had patted ourselves on the back and felt like we were doing a really, really good job in sharing and making data searchable and accessible," Jackson said. "So we got a very, very abrupt wake-up call in that." The principle generalises well beyond GIS. A digital workflow that cannot survive a degraded environment has one more question left to answer: what does your process look like when the infrastructure it depends on is unavailable?

49 MORE TO GO 

Leon County now has one dual-connection mobile router — a device that maintains simultaneous links to two cellular carriers so that if one goes down, the other takes over. The other 49 ambulances still run on single-carrier connections. Taylor said this plainly, without apology. Budget cycles, procurement timelines, and competing priorities are the texture of resilience work in government. The gap between knowing what you need and having it funded and deployed is where most of this work actually lives. A separate lesson came from a ransomware attack that took down the county's workforce scheduling platform for six weeks. The county's response: build a local data capture storing several weeks of scheduling data in-house. If the platform disappears again, managers have something to work from. 

THE MONITOR AND THE PARAMEDIC

Jennifer Huff, Deputy Chief at Polk County Fire Rescue, described a dynamic that reframes the AI oversight conversation in a useful way. When paramedics use monitoring equipment in the field, the device generates an interpretation of what it is reading. That interpretation, she said, is wrong nine times out of ten. The human has to know that — and has to know when to override it. The usual framing of human oversight treats it as a check on AI outputs — a backstop that catches errors before they have consequences. Huff's version goes further. In her context, the professional expertise is what makes the tool usable at all. Human judgment sits underneath the technology, not on top of it. The implication for AI deployment is worth sitting with. If your team is being trained to use AI outputs as a starting point rather than a default answer, that is a different kind of workforce investment than most AI rollout plans currently include.

"The technology and all of the equipment we use is technology-driven. But we as humans have to be able to interpret what we're seeing." — Jennifer Huff, Deputy Chief, Polk County Fire Rescue

The agencies in this conversation have done serious work. Florida's GIS infrastructure, Leon County's consolidated dispatch, Polk County's field technology — these represent years of sustained investment. What they are describing now is the next layer: building systems that assume failure will happen and plan accordingly, rather than treating continuity as the default and recovery as the exception. Most government technology procurement still starts from the other end. And the gap between the two is where the next set of hard lessons tends to arrive.

Watch the full session here: Advancing Public Safety in Florida Intelligent Systems