Emergency Operations intern, 15, accepted into FEMA’s youth council

Emergency Management

Director Jonathan Lord said Isabella Tarsitano has created programs the county government would otherwise have to pay a company to make.

Sierra Williams Staff Writer

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, Tarsitano 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 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.

“It feels awesome to be able to help, really, anywhere that I can,” Tarsitano said.

Tarsitano was also 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.

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 it as a onestop 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 selfdriven 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 saw that some older residents needed help finding important information during emergencies.

“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 the family couldn’t be prouder of her.

“We’re supporting Isabella,” he said. “She’s an extreme overachiever.”

He said the 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.

“I can’t brag on her enough,” Ken Tarsitano said.

Lord said that if he had his way, Tarsitano would 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.”

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While performing field sobriety exercises, which he failed, the man continued to argue with the officer about the officer’s prescription sunglasses.

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The second, an hour later, was to ask why someone came to his home, where he was warned about calling 911 without an emergency. The third was a call and hang up, and the fourth was to ask, again, why someone came to his home. The deputies placed the man under arrest for misuse of 911.

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3:38 a.m. — First block of Foster Lane, Palm Coast Burglary. A 51-year-old Palm Coast man wearing orange was caught burglarizing vehicles at 3 a.m., according to an arrest report.

The suspect was allegedly caught on door camera

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6:25 p.m. — Intersection of New Britain Avenue and North Beach Street, Ormond Beach DUI. While being investigated for drunk driving, a 67-yearold Ormond Beach man argued with a police officer because the officer was wearing prescription sunglasses. The man demanded he take them off.

Police had responded to a local parking lot after receiving a call about a crash, according to a police report. The caller said she believed the man was drunk. As police spoke with him, they noted that he smelled of alcohol, was unsteady and had slurred speech and bloodshot eyes.

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