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Manatee County rolls out Peregrine data hub to coordinate 2025 storm response
Summary
County emergency management officials described a new data-integration platform called Peregrine and outlined lessons from 2024 storms to shape response and recovery for 2025.
Manatee County officials described a new county data-integration platform and other preparedness steps intended to speed evacuation, rescue and recovery for the 2025 storm season.
Deputy Director of Public Safety James Crutchfield said the county is moving from siloed data streams to a single “data lake” called Peregrine that will feed dashboards to incident managers and elected officials so they can make real‑time, coordinated decisions. “It’s like a dashboard maker on steroids,” Crutchfield said.
Crutchfield framed the need by revisiting 2024 storms that tested county systems. He told the joint meeting that Hurricane Debbie produced rainfall “greater than a 500‑year flood” and that county damage estimates from the 2024 season included roughly $56,000,000 in residential and business losses. He said the county recorded about 300 rescues from islands to unincorporated areas and that high winds (as high as 120 mph in some places) heavily affected mobile home communities.
Nut graf: County emergency managers say Peregrine will give a common operating picture by combining NOAA gauges, lift‑station status, 911 call data, weather forecasts and other layers so officials can prioritize limited resources during both response and long‑term recovery.
Officials said the county has already used lessons from the 2024 season to change posture: more incident management team (IMT) deployments, regular coordination with municipal partners, increased outreach to homeowners and HOAs, and ongoing training exercises. Crutchfield said county recovery work included 90 straight days of sand and debris operations on barrier islands and that storm surge moved enough sand to “fill 61 Olympic swimming pools.”
County staff emphasized the programmatic shift from focusing on reimbursement to focusing on community impacts: pre‑drafted mission requests (for items such as Tiger Dams), pre‑identified neighborhood priorities and daily EM coordination with municipal partners. Crutchfield said the county will use Peregrine to “forecast and see real time that the rivers are rising” and to overlay multiple data sources so evacuation, sheltering and road‑closure decisions align with the full picture.
Ending: Officials said Peregrine is part of a broader push to institutionalize lessons from 2024. They plan continued training with municipal partners and community outreach ahead of the 2025 season.
