Seven activations across the tenure, in the role responsible for technology through the event.
Two phases of it. The senior network engineer post carried a place in Logistics when the center activated, which is how the duty began in 2006; the formal designation as the division’s Emergency Coordination Officer came in 2008, under a mayoral executive order requiring every City department to name one.
An activation is the only test of a resilience design that counts. Everything else — the diverse paths, the out-of-region standby, the survivable local call processing, the COOP document — is an argument that something will hold. A hurricane is the experiment, run without consent, on the day the systems matter most and the people who maintain them are also evacuating.
The work during an activation is availability: public safety radio, dispatch, the EOC’s own systems and the city platforms that emergency management depends on, kept running while the conditions that the design anticipated actually arrive.
The work after it is the part that compounds. Each activation closed with an after-action review, and those reviews fed directly back into the architecture — which is why the resilience decisions across this record are not theoretical. A design informed by seven real activations is a different artifact from one informed by a risk register, and the difference shows up in what it chooses to spend money on.
Outcome
Design decisions taken against measured failures rather than imagined ones.