Tornado changes career course for Mass. entrepreneur

Photo Credit: FEMA/Robert Rose

Recovers.org CEO Caitria O'Neill and Cooper Taylor of the Community Life Church in Forney, Texas help locals after a tornado hit the area.

Recent Harvard University grad Caitria O?Neill was ready to pack her bags to earn her master?s in Moscow when a tornado blew into her hometown of Munson on June 1, 2011, pulled the roof off her home and left her and an entire community with a disaster. It also left O?Neill with the idea to launch Recovers.org, a cloud-based platform to help with disaster recovery efforts. Recovers.org, which received $340,000 in funding, was one of six companies that received a financial boost from the Knight Foundation Monday.

Recovers.org CEO Caitria O?Neill was in the front yard when the tornado came over the hill. Because tornadoes are atypical in Massachusetts O?Neill stayed put. ?I stayed there until the lamp post came out of the ground and flew up in the air,? she said. O?Neill and the rest of her family sought shelter in their basement until it was safe to come out.

On day one she and her family boarded up windows and cleaned up, but on day two they went to a local church which had become a de facto shelter. What she found there was a community in chaos with very little organization and leadership.

?Unfortunately the city manager and fire chief know what they need but don?t have the tools to share it,? O?Neill said. ?We decided to build the tools to fill the gap.?

Because of what she experienced at the church, O?Neill, 23, and her sister Morgan O?Neill, 25, a certified EMT and active volunteer for an ambulance service and the Red Cross, teamed up with software engineer Alvin Liang, 29, and built Recovers.org.

?We started this because of the lack of organization as well as the gap between the ability of people to accept help,? she said. ?National groups such as the Red Cross and United Way mobilize their resources and fulfill specific duties but what is not realized is they don?t have an infrastructure for spontaneous volunteers, can?t accept local donations and can?t stay.?

The trio used a ?hodge-podge of Internet tools? and flipped the switch on Recovers.org.

The result was an organizing platform and Web tools developed to help local communities with their disaster recovery efforts. The platform can be launched before or minutes after a disaster or event, according to the younger O?Neill.
?
The trio has spent the last year attending regional planning meetings to discuss emergency plans. Today, five communities in Indiana will use the software to organize in non-disaster cases and larger contracts are in the pipeline, according to the company.

Because a community recently hit with a disaster may not have power or Internet access, Recovers.org will be hosted in the cloud so that the site does not have to be manned and can collect resources.

The best example of that was in Forney, Texas where Recovers.org created a site for the community. According to O?Neill, there were massive amounts of traffic to the site and the team was able to match volunteers offering everything from translation to chainsawing with the needs that came later.

Funding from the Knight Foundation was timely. ?Right now it is an amazing boost for us because when I sell a contract to an area I need the staff to support me and this gives us the ability to scale up quickly and hire the staff,?

chris carter superbowl 2012 kickoff time what time is the super bowl 2012 nfl mvp lana del rey snl performance nick diaz sheryl sandberg