- May 20, 2024
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Flagler County’s Emergency Operations Center does not usually have interns who are under 18, Director Jonathan Lord said. But Isabella Tarsitano is the EOC’s secret weapon.
“Some of the stuff she’s done is significantly more advanced than our skill sets, and we would have had to actually pay a company to do it,” Lord said.
At 15, she has been an intern at the Emergency Operations Center since September 2022, writing code for WebEOC, the center’s disaster management software system.
Lord said his staff uses WebEOC to see what the community needs during disasters. Since September, Tarsitano has already designed an internal dashboard on WebEOC that lets staff collate and direct information from calls received during an emergency.
“She actually built that one from scratch,” Lord said.
Lord said he and the team drew out a design for what they wanted the dashboard to do, and just handed it to Tarsitano and let her run with it. He said he is amazed at what she has been able to accomplish.
Some of the stuff she's done is significantly more advanced than our skill sets, and we would have had to actually pay a company to do it."
— JONATHAN LORD, Flagler County Emergency Management Director
Tarsitano was accepted as a member of FEMA’s 2023 Youth Preparedness Council in early June. The council is national and accepts members from each of the 10 FEMA regions across the United States. It begins with a summit in Washington D.C. in late July.
“It feels awesome to be able to help, really, anywhere that I can,” Tarsitano said.
Lord said he first became aware of Tarsitano from a website she designed, called Hurricane Helpers.
The website, Tarsitano said, acts as a resource guide for residents. Tarsitano said she created the website as a one-stop resource for Flagler County residents. It includes links to official Flagler County and Florida emergency information guides and emergency contacts.
Emergency Management Planner Tiffany Islam, Tarsitano’s supervisor, said staff members bring the teen problems or ideas, and in just a few hours, she’ll have solutions and recommendations.
Sometimes, when Tarsitano’s stuck on a problem, Islam said, the two of them will try to talk it out. But just as often, Islam’s reaching out to Tarsitano for advice.
Often, Islam said, Tarsitano solves the problem faster than anyone expects.
“It’s like, the one issue we were stuck on, she had already figured out,” Islam said.
Tarsitano’s coding journey began when she took some classes for Florida Virtual School several years ago, she said.
“I absolutely fell in love with coding,” she said. “So, I just started coding on my own and started teaching myself how to code.”
She started several online and self-driven courses from the nonprofit Girls Who Code and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which offered free online courses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She now has beginner to intermediate certifications in Java, HTML and CSS and intermediate to advanced certifications in Python and cyber security.
That’s how she is with her interests, Tarsitano said: Once a subject catches her fancy, she dives right in. Quantum mechanics is her latest one.
Tarsitano became interested in disaster relief after Hurricanes Matthew and Irma hit Flagler County.
She said she saw that the older generation was unable to help themselves.
“I realized that this is something that we can fix,” she said. “That it is just being able to get the information out there and being able to better curate volunteers.”
In eighth grade, she said, she applied and was accepted into FEMA’s Region 4 2021-2022 Youth Preparedness Council. Hurricane Helpers was born from a council project, Tarsitano said.
Tarsitano’s father, Ken, said their family couldn’t be prouder of her.
“We’re supporting Isabella,” he said. “She’s an extreme overachiever.”
He said their family has a strong interest in science, and he and his wife have always encouraged their kids to develop their own skills and interests.
Not only is his daughter talented academically — she’s already taken four AP classes, as a sophomore — she also runs track and swims at Flagler Palm Coast High School.
It feels amazing that I can actually contribute to something and help people out in the long term, in the short term, however I can. That’s really my goals here.
— ISABELLA TARSITANO, EOC intern
“I can’t brag on her enough,” Ken Tarsitano said.
If he has his way, Lord said, he hopes Tarsitano will continue working with the EOC for a long while.
Tarsitano is not quite sure what she wants to do in the future.
She wants to go to MIT, and coding is her top hobby and passion, but she still has time to figure things out.
For now, she said, she’s happy to help out at the EOC.
“It feels amazing that I can actually contribute to something and help people out in the long term, in the short term, however I can,” Tarsitano said. “That’s really my goal here.”
