Carrollton Enterprise Services
Having been a technology entrepreneur and business owner from the mid-90s onwards, Mr. Reade’s knowledge of disaster recovery prior to Katrina was limited to the kind that refers to backups and hot sites for data centers.
However, starting on August 29th, 2005 and continuing for the ten years since, he and his company, Carrollton Enterprise Services, have gotten a first class education in the subject and learned its hard lessons on the ground in the recoveries from Katrina, Rita, Gustav, the BP Spill and numerous other, smaller events. He and the company are now experts in using IT to assist long-term disaster recovery efforts and work in it daily.
In 2005 Mr. Reade helped found the Louisiana family Recovery Corps, a $120 million fund to coordinate agencies operating after the storm and to give out micro-grants to enable people to get back into their homes. That same year he worked with the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the Louisiana Foundation (then called the Bush/Clinton Katrina fund and later the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation), Gohsep, the City of New Orleans and over 20 other government and non-governmental agencies to create an information sharing website called LouisianaRebuilds, which was launched officially by Governor Blanco in December of 2005 and is now called GNOInfo.com. The site received numerous awards and was cited frequently as a lesson learned best practice for disaster recovery information sharing efforts
His company created numerous software tools to aid coordination, including the W3 (Who, What, Where) directory modeled of of the UNs systems and CORE – the Cross Organizational Referral Engine that Louisiana Spirit of DHH used to coordinate the relief activities of 90,000 families over several years.
Later in the recovery period Mr. Reade and Carrollton worked on the Road Home Program’s elevation program HMGP. This program, which is just now wrapping up, helped move thousands of homes out of the path of future flooding events and is now a national model that FEMA has continued using including, most recently, in New Jersey, Connecticut and New York Sandy recovery efforts.
In 2012, Carrollton started work providing senior IT management, oversight and systems for the Deepwater Horizon Economic Claims Center, which is the largest class action in US history and the largest disaster recovery compensation program of any kind anywhere in the world. This work continues today and is expected to continue for several years more.
In 2013 he joined the board of Prepare Innovations to help create a software system called Prepare that safeguards people’s data in case of disaster and facilitates communication between families and friends.
Mr. Reade works daily to provide community information through his NPR broadcasts locally in the GNO area on the GNOInfo minute, which he started in 2006. He has spoken at many disaster recovery panels, including the 2016 and 2017 Res/Con resiliency and continues to speak and write on the importance of IT in long-term disaster recovery efforts.
