Everything's Fine: The Disaster Deck started with a frustration I kept running into working alongside county emergency management: the tabletop exercises that matter most — realistic, HSEEP-compliant, properly documented — were either too expensive for small county budgets or too complex to pull off without outside help.
After seven years supporting county EM operations in Florida through hurricane and wildfire activations, in roles including Planning Section Chief, Situation Unit Lead, and GIS Lead, I understood both sides of that gap. I'd seen what a well-run exercise produces — and what it costs to get there. For most county EM offices running lean with limited budgets, that cost was simply out of reach.
I also noticed a second problem. County staff outside of emergency management — public works, finance, health departments, elected officials' staff — often have little real understanding of ICS roles, ESF functions, or how incident response actually coordinates under pressure. The exercises that could fix that were the same ones priced out of reach. And when those exercises did happen, the format was rarely engaging enough to hold the attention of people who didn't already live and breathe emergency management.
This platform is my attempt to close both gaps. A tool built by someone who's been in the EOC — not a software company trying to learn the field from the outside in.
Carley Fitzgerald
FAEM · GISP · Founder, Everything's Fine: The Disaster Deck
✓ Florida Associate Emergency Manager (FAEM) certification
✓ GIS Professional (GISP) certification
✓ 7 years supporting county emergency management operations in Florida
✓ Hurricane and wildfire activation experience — Planning Section Chief, Situation Unit Lead, GIS Lead
✓ Conference presenter and instructor — current topics include:
— Situational Awareness Using GIS
— Enhancing Emergency Management with GIS
— Continuity Planning for GIS Managers
— Leadership for GIS Managers
✓ Active tabletop exercise participant and developer
The GIS background isn't a detour. Teaching Situational Awareness Using GISand Enhancing Emergency Management with GIS at conferences is why the platform includes over 25 GIS-specific action cards — covering common operating picture, spatial damage assessment, plume modeling, and real-time air monitoring layers — that most exercise tools overlook entirely.
Everything's Fine: The Disaster Deck is a HSEEP-aligned tabletop exercise platform that any local government EM team can run on their own. A Full Exercise Workshop generates a complete documentation package — Exercise Plan, Exercise Evaluation Guide, After-Action Report, and Improvement Plan — automatically.
Most exercise platforms are built by technology companies that have learned emergency management from the outside. This one was built from inside the field — by someone who has sat at the Planning Section table, managed the GIS unit during an activation, and understood the budget reality that makes formal exercise programs unreachable for most small county EM offices.
The HSEEP alignment, the scenario library, the GIS-specific action cards, the focus on non-EM staff engagement — those weren't features added to make the product look more complete. They came from seven years of watching what actually happens in exercises and what's missing from the way most agencies train.