Florida Energy Assurance Plan

This spring, Florida held the nation’s first statewide emergency preparedness training and exercises geared specifically to the aftermath of severe geomagnetic events. Funded by the State of Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM) via a Department of Energy grant and held in collaboration with Watch House International, Inquesta Corporation, and the Florida Institute of Technology, the 17–19 April 2012 workshop had 99 on-site attendees in an oceanfront hotel in Melbourne, Florida, as well as 16 over live Web streaming. The workshop was the capstone to a three-month season of 21 regional space weather training sessions and workshops serving 386 attendees in total. Participants included emergency managers, law enforcement officers, emergency medicine practitioners, and private industry stakeholders, including representatives from utility and telecommunications companies. The three-day statewide workshop began with one day of education and targeted training, featuring space weather experts in government, academia, and private companies, as well as the regional utility grid reliability organization. The following two days were devoted to a tabletop exercise where participants, divided into groups by area of responsibility, worked through an evolving scenario of space weather–related events, running through their preparedness plans and examining responses.