Grady Joseph
@gradyjoseph

Managing disasters @TerraFort 🇺🇸/acc former @fema and @caloes

 San Francisco, CA
terrafort.com
Joined January 2020
172 Photos and videos
Hospitals are actually the entities you should hate not insurance
Emma Camp
@emmma_camp_
Sep 27
It's easy to hate insurance companies, but do you have the courage to hate hospitals?
1
16
TerraFort’s first field experiment failed in Santa Barbara County. I’m still glad we ran it. Plan: 360 cams on trucks. Drive the damage. Problem: a flood takes out the road you need to document the flood. Deleted ground collection. Went to drones, satellites, and voice AI on mobile apps — none of those need the road. That’s what we sell now. Kelly Hubbard at Santa Barbara County OEM greenlit a cold email mid-response when we had no product. We never delivered them real value. What we learned there is in every deployment now.
2
36
Hurricane Marie never made landfall in California. Its surf still damaged ~70 structures from San Diego to Malibu. 8–20 ft waves. Berms washed out in Long Beach and Seal Beach. Homes red-tagged in Malibu and Dana Point.
1
92
County emergency managers run these stretches on almost no sleep. The public barely sees it. Document your infrastructure before the next storm. A few photos go a long way.
2
Clearest takeaway from a summit about AI for disasters: …almost nobody is using AI for disasters. 1,100+ AI products from 700+ companies selling into this space. Ask how many have actually run a disaster with a county and the number collapses. Emergency managers don’t need better models. They need tools that survive a federal audit, work on a degraded network, and fit a government disaster budget — not a token meter.
10
Clearest takeaway from a summit about AI for disasters: …almost nobody is using AI for disasters. 1,100+ AI products from 700+ companies selling into this space. Ask how many have actually run a disaster with a county and the number collapses. Emergency managers don’t need better models. They need tools that survive a federal audit, work on a degraded network, and fit a government disaster budget — not a token meter.
1
12
Clearest takeaway from a summit about AI for disasters: …almost nobody is using AI for disasters. 1,100+ AI products from 700+ companies selling into this space. Ask how many have actually run a disaster with a county and the number collapses. Emergency managers don’t need better models. They need tools that survive a federal audit, work on a degraded network, and fit a government disaster budget — not a token meter.
9
Grady Joseph retweeted
Nick Huber
@sweatystartup
Sep 22
Tesla could bankrupt every other automaker and become the largest company in the world if they simply build a full size SUV with full self driving and starlink. Make a large vehicle and people will buy it!!!
1,099
315
11,631
633,382
Grady Joseph retweeted
Ryan Petersen
@typesfast
Sep 20
If Anthropic is worried about rogue AI killing everyone why did they give it control of a robotic biology lab?
144
83
1,409
116,143
Parametric FEMA triggers will either fix disaster declarations or break them. Same word. One number. Rainfall trigger at 9" → most real disasters still qualify. At 30" → basically only Harvey. DC is arguing whether to go parametric. The only fight that matters: who sets the number. If you’re not in that room, don’t assume it’s set in your favor.
13
We're killing hourly billing at TerraFort. Starting with site inspections. Disaster recovery still runs on time-and-materials — a tax on communities waiting to rebuild. When software compresses a 20-hour inspection into ~3, fixed price stops being "risky" and starts being the only honest bid. Big firms won't go first. We are. Then we make it inevitable for everyone else.
15
FEMA flood maps have two versions of every line. One is science. The other is politics with a public-comment stamp. Buy “outside the zone,” skip insurance, then flood anyway. $200k out of pocket. The map lied. Insurance is the real resilience stack. If your residents aren’t covered for the risk they actually face, you don’t have a recovery plan — you have a hope.
10
California just spent days in brutal heat again — the kind that cooks the grid and puts emergency managers on edge. In Sept 2022, Cal OES used the Wireless Emergency Alert system (same channel as Amber Alerts) to push a message straight to millions of phones: Conserve power now. Raise the thermostat. Cut nonessential load. Demand fell hard. Rolling blackouts that were minutes away never happened. That’s the best real-world example I know of what “mutual aid” actually needs. Mutual aid is agencies helping each other under stress — crews, generators, shelter capacity, whatever the gap is. California already has that capacity spread across counties. What usually fails isn’t willingness. It’s the signal: who needs what, where, and how fast. Same lesson as the WEA blast. The network exists. Coordination is the product.
29
Epic. CA should be much more focused on turning every home and EV into a virtual power plant. This democratizes the capex required to adopt renewables
Tesla Energy
@teslaenergy
Sep 10
~69,000 Powerwall owners across California are currently dispatching more than 500 MW to the grid, helping meet peak demand during today's heatwave Equivalent to the output of a power plant, but from Powerwalls already in people's homes
69
Grady Joseph retweeted
Wes
@wmorrill3
Sep 6
Both are self-driving with end to end nueral nets - photons in, actions out
197
575
10,836
408,404
Smoke too thick to fly. Still counted the destroyed homes in Spokane within 24 hours. That’s what SAR is for. Satellite on day 5. Drones on day 10. One fire. Three sensors. Rapid recovery starts when the count is real.
1
29
It’s great to see this change
Daniel Lurie 丹尼爾·羅偉
@DanielLurie
Aug 31
We are seeking new contracts for all of San Francisco’s homelessness services, prioritizing accountability and results. This effort will shift all contracts to an outcomes-driven model and incorporate performance metrics. We are also seeking feedback from the community and providers throughout this process. Our administration is fundamentally transforming how the city tackles homelessness and addiction. We are not just getting people off the streets—we are helping them get on the path to recovery and stability.  But that work can only succeed with a system that is built to deliver results, with accountability when the outcomes aren't good enough. We are not going to continue spending $1 billion of taxpayer money on a failing system—we're fixing the system so we can deliver the safe and clean streets every San Franciscan deserves.
27
Anti-data center sentiment is a Chinese Psyop
Polymarket
@Polymarket
Aug 28
BREAKING: 𝕏 reveals it uncovered a Chinese bot farm of roughly 200,000 accounts, including hundreds used to influence U.S. debate over AI data centers & energy policy.
1
32
Grady Joseph retweeted
Beff (e/acc)
@beffjezos
Aug 27
we went from "AGI will be the end of all things, the singularity at the end of time, the end is nigh" to "just put the B2B SaaS in the bag lil bro" real quick
Salesforce
89
80
1,520
212,650
It’s crazy how often Scott has to get state laws passed to overrule SF because @sfbos is so dysfunctional
Senator Scott Wiener@Scott_Wiener
Aug 27
My bill to allow homeowners to replace their windows with energy-efficient windows without city/HOA micro-management just received its final sign-off from the Senate and is headed to the Governor. People should be able to lower their energy bills by weatherizing their windows without cities or HOAs banning it or forcing them to pay dramatically more for bespoke replica windows. SB 908 will help.
1
37
Load more