How does Christina Moore, who generally works from home in rural Vermont, now find herself living in a hotel and working 12-hour days in San Juan, Puerto Rico? Chalk it up to a hurricane. Not Irma or Maria, which swept over the island in September, but Irene, which hit the US Northeast in 2011. More on that later.
Back to San Juan, PR, where Moore sweats long days in a convention facility that serves as the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s joint operations center. “It’s a place of controlled bedlam,” Moore says, as local, state, and federal teams work to put the island’s infrastructure back on its feet. “I’m in there with 3,000 to 5,000 people every day,” she says. “If you swing your elbow, you hit somebody. If you stand up, you bang someone’s chair.”
Christina Moore helps Puerto Ricans apply for federal infrastructure grants using Oracle Application Express.
Her job: Bring the lessons she learned, and apps she built, after her hometown in Vermont was smashed by Hurricane Irene in 2011, and use them to help Puerto Ricans succeed in applying for and administering federal infrastructure grants. It’s one thing to get the grant, she says, and another to use it with the type of transparency FEMA demands. “They audit their grants, and if they find flaws, they can reach into a bank and take it back,” says Moore. The storms were a catastrophe, she says, but a botched grant process can unleash a “second disaster” on a community trying to rebuild.
With power still out for 80% of the island and cell phone coverage, fuel, and water in short supply, there is much to do. Moore is helping “local officials and nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] who have real responsibilities to real people,” she says. “They need to secure a school before the next rainstorm. They need to feed and water 200 people for 60 days. They need to put up a temporary bridge because a community is completely isolated.”
Lessons from Irene
When Hurricane Irene came through, it removed “miles of roads,” and cut access to her small town of Halifax, Vermont, she recalls. “It literally washed the roads away,” as trees swept down from the nearby Appalachian Mountains shattering culverts and bridges, she says. “To this day, you walk down the river and find huge chunks of concrete that are a quarter-mile from a bridge and you’re like, ‘How did it get here?’”
When rebuilding began, Moore later told the local NPR station, “FEMA did its part to help,” but people in her town didn’t understand the federal bureaucracy. “Applicants were basically left to their own devices in following these very complicated federal rules.”
So Moore, who was not working in software at the time but knew federal processes from past work experience, decided to write an application to help local grant seekers “do things step by step the FEMA way,” she says. The app caught on.
Today, Moore's small firm, Storm Petrel, will be managing 100% of the federal disaster recovery grants in Puerto Rico.
Tools of the Trade
The leap from startup to FEMA partner is due, in part, to a decision Moore made early on, choosing a development tool that comes free with Oracle Database, called Oracle Application Express. Known in the application development world as Oracle APEX, the tool has spawned a vibrant community of individuals and small firms who want to build rugged, web-based applications. “It’s a data-centric development platform inside the database, so once you have the database you have Oracle APEX at no cost,” says Software Development Vice President at Oracle Mike Hichwa, who wrote Oracle APEX long before it became a phenomenon and now manages the team that continues to update the product for its growing fan base.
“When I built it, I was just applying the benefits of an enterprise database to an application development platform,” Hichwa says. “It was like a five-star hotel; it had all theamenities: powerful Oracle SQL language, multi-user concurrency control, and itquickly builds applications thatscale just like the Oracle database,” he says.
So while Oracle APEX was first envisioned as a tool forproductivity and ease of use, “it’s in a database that lives in the context of hugeenterpriseapplications, so it’s hardened,” in a way that resonates with application developers, he says.
“We looked at a lot of frameworks before settling on Oracle APEX,” Moore recalls, who tapped a key member of the Oracle APEX community for help getting started. “What I love about the tool is you could have somebody with a few weeks’ worth of the training throw together a screen, or you can have somebody with five-plus years of experience and do really interesting workloads and complex stuff.” Plus, she adds, “The Oracle brand carries a degree of integrity and history, and that really helps a small company like ours work with an agency like FEMA.
So Moore finds herself cheek-to-jowl with utilities workers, military personnel, and state employees rebuilding an island, and she’s happy. She knows that’s where she belongs.
“Everything had destruction on it,” she told NPR about her first moments in Puerto Rico. “Every tree top and every palmtop is just removed. Wires are down everywhere. There’s debris everywhere. The new buildings weathered the storm terrifically well, but those that were more than a couple of decades old—they have no windows. They have no roofs.”
Unlike when Hurricane Irene hit Vermont, however, this time Moore is prepared and in a position to help. “We’ve got about 421 grant applications in our system with about $1.1 billion tied to that, and we’re only at week 7,” she says. When longer-term building starts, Moore believes those numbers will increase substantially.
Jeff Erickson is editor at large for Oracle.
