EYEWALL: Pre-session Briefing (Introduction)
Transcript, with a description of what is shown on screen.

Video: video/EYEWALL-Intro.mp4, 3 minutes 19 seconds.
Speakers: One speaker, a woman narrator in a dark suit, who also appears on screen in a room full of monitors.
Sound: Speech, with background music under the voice, and music alone at the end.
The video also shows its own captions at the bottom of the frame.

[0:00] On screen: A sepia, surveillance style shot of palm trees and waves breaking over a stormy seawall, with screen labels such as MISSION CONTROL, LIVE FEED and THREAT LEVEL: CAT 5.
Narrator: The clock is running. Nature is indifferent. Leadership is the variable.

[0:06] On screen: Black and white aerial footage of a flooded neighborhood, with tracking boxes and labels for elevation and sector, marked FLOOD SURVEY.
Narrator: August 2005. Hurricane Katrina kills more than one thousand eight hundred people. The official report calls it a failure of leadership, coordination, and communication, not of the storm.

[0:20] On screen: A dark street at night with no power. Labels read MARIA, FATALITIES: 2,975 and GRID POWER: 0%.
Narrator: 2017. Hurricane Maria. Puerto Rico loses power for nearly a year. Nearly 3,000 dead. A delayed cabinet response turns a Category 4 into a humanitarian collapse.

[0:34] On screen: Sepia archive footage marked SANDY 2012: a patient carried out in the dark, then a flooded, empty gas station at night.
Narrator: 2012. Superstorm Sandy. Hospitals evacuate in the dark. Fuel runs out. Mayors and governors give contradicting orders on live television.

[0:45] On screen: Over the gas station footage, a banner reads "THE STORM WAS NOT THE DISASTER. THE CABINET WAS."
Narrator: In every case, the storm was survivable. The decision-making was not.

[0:49] On screen: The narrator appears in front of a wall of monitors.
Narrator: This is EYEWALL, a six-player cabinet simulation where you do not fight the storm. You run the city.

[0:56] On screen: A map of the fictional city of Port Alya with its eight district tags. A panel fills in: CITY: PORT ALYA, POPULATION: 1.4 MILLION, TERRAIN: LOW-LYING COAST, THREAT: HURRICANE HELIOS.
Narrator: The city is Port Alya, 1.4 million people on a low-lying coast. The storm is Hurricane Helios, projected landfall in 72 hours.

[1:06] On screen: The names of the six days, then counters that settle on 48 DECISIONS and 12 TEAM VOTES, with an alert reading 12 TEAM VOTES ON DILEMMAS FROM REAL HISTORY.
Narrator: You and five colleagues form the city cabinet. Over six in-game days: Watch, Warning, Evacuation, Landfall, Recovery, and Aftermath. You will make 48 final decisions, including 12 team votes on dilemmas drawn from real history. Every choice has tradeoffs. There are no clean wins.

[1:29] On screen: The city map zooms in on each district in turn as it is named, with its tag and a panel showing its population: HBR Harborfront, BAY Bayview Barrier, RVB Riverbend, MID Midtown, WRG West Ridge, SWK South Works, HLT North Health Corridor and OUT Outer Crescent, the last with an arrow marking the evacuation route.
Narrator: Harborfront, 185,000 people. Tourism and port infrastructure on the bay edge. Surge-risk tier one. Bayview Barrier, 92,000 on a barrier island. First to flood. Mandatory evacuation in any Category 2. Riverbend, 248,000. An inland flood basin. The most vulnerable district in Port Alya. Midtown, 156,000. The commercial core. City Hall and the Emergency Operations Center sit here. West Ridge, 201,000. Elevated suburbs designated as host shelters. South Works, 133,000. Refineries and chemical plants. Cascade-failure risk if power fails. North Health Corridor, 119,000. The hospital cluster and nursing facilities. Outer Crescent, 287,000. The largest district. Lower flood risk, but the longest evacuation time in the city.

[2:32] On screen: Six people, three women and three men, sit around a round table in a dark situation room with hurricane images on the screens around them. Then a card reading STORM UPDATE, and a chart splitting into two paths.
Narrator: Six seats. One Mayor, political authority and the final call. Five chiefs: Emergency Management, Infrastructure, Health, Communications, and Forecasting and AI Systems. Each day you submit your own department's decision, and you vote on the team's shared decisions where everyone can see your vote. Lives, Resources, Public Trust and Teamwork are scored on every choice. Your votes and your silences are all recorded in the After-Action Report.

[3:06] On screen: The narrator is back in front of the monitors for the closing lines.
Narrator: The storm is coming. The cabinet decides who survives it. Welcome to EYEWALL. Take your seat. Authorizing simulation now.

[3:15] On screen: A black screen reads ACCESS GRANTED, COMMANDER AUTHORIZED, with Political authority: Mayor and tags for the five departments: Emergency Management, Infrastructure, Health, Communications, and Forecasting and AI. Then a short silent end card.

End of transcript.