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Emergency Communications & Disaster Management Workshop: I’m particularly interested in covering this session because it impacts several PTC member interests and is especially timely, given recent natural disasters (tsunamis, earthquakes, extreme temperatures and snowfall, etc.) around the globe. This is a big panel and there’s lots to learn.
Ken Zita: Catastrophes have driven opportunities to look at the world of telecom in a new light: human tragedies impact everything that needs to be done: search and rescue, medical care, refugee management, military-civilian coordination, logistics. Improvements to tools, collaboration.
- Lesson 1: Shared awareness about link between destructive powers of natural disasters and poverty (vulnerable societies, political priority).
- Lesson 2: It’s not about technology, it’s about working together and sharing information among all parties.
- Lesson 3: ICT tools are essential, and getting better to support decision support systems at Emergency Operations Centers. Important to make sure parts of ICT can talk to each other. Social and organic networks can also assist in getting information out.
Needs and opportunities: establish communications as a basic utility, improve relationship between “official” and “organic” information flows, ongoing process to improve collaboration, and data sharing protocols and procedures.
Pat Lanthier: it’s about innovation (passing around a solar powering device). Adoption of the technology is the problem. Mobile Internet jumping to 550M in a few years, 87% of laptops embedded w mobile, devices (iPhone >100K, netbooks, etc.), driven by “super chips” and enabling cognitive radio (like spectrum “mash-up”). Success triad (holistic, not just technology): hard infrastructure (top), soft infrastructure, base: visionary leadership. Examples: OASIS deployable broadband, Golden Gate safety network. Innovation: needs democratizing, thought leadership (policy and practices), link back.
LTC Howard Pickett: Goal of a communicator: provide communications, do it rapidly. Timeframe is limited, whatever we bring must come with power, without interoperability challenges, with leadership. Least common denominator where individual needs help: what kind of broadcasts reach them? Apply new technology as much as possible in innovative ways to solve old problems. Opportunity within Military to test new systems: assure interoperability between tech, systems, nations. No matter what we do, there are leadership policy concerns and decisions, training needed. Link between humanitarian assistance (through NGOs) and military methods & perspectives.
ChĂ©rif Ghaly: “Telecommunications saves lives.” Adoption in May 1991 of Tampere Convention: provision of resources (on invitation to UN), includes inter-agency standing committee (IASC). Can’t innovate in an emergency. Levels of coordination: global (standards), regional, capital (strategic), and field (operational). Emergency appointments for ITU (they have a group to pull from), global standards and calling codes, other tools to facilitate communications, and is coordinated by emergency telecom clusters (framework, deliverables, timeframes, resources, evaluations) to make use of local expertise. Example: Haiti: most telecom infrastructure destroyed, UN stabilitation mission to provide ICT services (including to government). Looking for minimal deployments, providers of last resport; only called in when local and regional resources need help. Collaboration with military and private sector: what’s working or not? Good will works with the military, what doesn’t work is individual people (who is in command). Private sector: doesn’t work when counterparts are in competition (sales). Enormous amount of uncoordinated aid (that may or may not be required) is a challenge that UN sometimes helps with.
William Dunlop: Network-Centric Maritime Radiation Awareness and Interdiction Experiments (History and Plans). Test bed to evaluate use of networks, advanced sensors and collaborative tech for globallly-supported Maritime interdiction Operations. Many global cooperation partners, rapidly deployable network in San Francisco bay area (provided by Naval Post-Graduate School) with 802.16 & mesh networking and relay. Also tests biometric applications, self-forming network and collaborative technology. Practice with first responders. Boats positioned to scan incoming boats for radiation, sends data to Livermore for analysis. Reachback is key function to provide technical support to first repsonders.
Next subject (Dunlop): Livermore Valley Joint Unified Schools Emergency Disaster Preparedness. Wireless networks at each school, exercises to coordinate local police/fire, surveillance and resources. Keys: common operational procedures, communications among many participants. (Note: In California, schools are built to higher safety standards than housing.)
Martin Griss: Disaster Management Initiative. Coordination among citizens, emergency responders, mobile command centers is an interesting topic. How should they be linked in systematic way? (Citizens can send info but need to inform them about what’s happening, how to feed info to responders or through command centers, most practitioners have paper-based mentality.) Information filtering and image recognition, deployment needs are challenges. First responders: what’s in a building, how to compare what you see with what used to be there, how to track people (firefighters) inside a building. What should be done? Announcing a new disaster management initiative, with affiliates, standards (e.g., open software, data portability), help to prototype mobile geocam, collaboration, tracking, mapping and sensing. How to enhance collaborative opportunities, and what does collaboration mean? Using the information to support the decisions. Example prototype graphic: dashboard in Twiki with widgets for workflow, reports, frames (maps, etc), prioritization, spreadsheet for calculating, RSS feed w prioritization, enterprise social networking. Can be customized for different views. WiMAX Pilot (4G) with Clearwire, physical site (NASA Moffett field) and equiping students and partners with 4G devices all have challenges.
Juan Godoy: Satellite Communications: A differentiating emergency management tool. Wireless has different form factors, mobility options, and can be used to create hastily formed networks that support a wide range of technologies and needs. Initial response is followed by longer term response (example: New Orleans recovery efforts, coordinating from two centers, NIMS and ICS team members helped staff efforts. Volunteer response was evaluated, successes include entering hot zones with advance preparation and adequate supplies, local relationships were key to success. Also equipment had been tested ahead. Public safety agencies have adoption barriers to satellite technology. Lessons learned: more cost effective satellite communications capability: dedicated, affordable, automated capabilities (traffic shaping), etc. Need to establish hastily formed networks more effectively. Also lighter-than-air (balloon) satellite technology could be used, may provide significant coverage of affected areas (e.g., 80% of Hong Kong). Training is very important for field personnel, emergency operations. We need to have pre-incident collaboration between customary mutual aid partners and stakeholders. Satellite can be very costly, especially compared to terrestrial bandwidth. Ideas for future: national & regional safety agency consortia, use GIS as standard to encourage corroboration by public safety agencies.
Neil Tagare: Wanted ASAP: A Global Mesh Disaster Recovery and Restoration Network. Currently: no global inter-carrier mesh network, few indiv carriers building own, only way for cable-on-cable restoration, global financial meltdown creates risk regarding “joint and several” liability, each cable has differenet owners, business models, politics, etc. Need a 3rd party to craete such a network. What’s happening now: multiple & simultaneous cable cuts, fear of terrorist attack, capex for new cable under pressure. Single point of failure to several locations can prove to be disaster, and government does not provide level 1 security (to private assets). “Meet-me” rooms in 200 countries, 10 in Asia, where bandwidth provided by carriers where they want to interconnect. (Diagrams of how this can be done.) Big picture: connect 400+ Meet-Me rooms to submarine cables, domestic cables, satellites and other networks/gateways, insure products against calamity, encourage interconnection, allow carriers to sell to others who need bandwidth.
Robert  Desourdis: Achieving Smart City Resilience. Interoperability has little to do with technology, more to do with perceived personal or agency interests and trust. Outline: smart city, sense and respond architecture, summary, backup. Bob’s new book looks at common failures in history, especially chapter three. (Also see his PDF paper on 24 deficiencies from PTC ‘09.) Best practices, moment-to-moment collaboration, other principles of successful information sharing and use practices are almost never used. (Example: level of particular military training was so high that people never believed that kind of attack would happen.) Trust: organizations won’t share data if they think cooperating organizations might get in the way. If no trust, perfect intelligence won’t be useful. Nobody intends to be planning for disasters until they begin. Develop a stregic plan, map out critical message flows between agencies, how to tell people where to go (especially for critical functions). Technology goes beyond “publish and subscribe.” Interoperability is non-linear, can result in horrendous effects if wrong, and is likely to contain a significant failure. (Example: air traffic control has some automation for management.) Government, for example, depends on a more detailed command-oriented architecture, but appears incapable of it. What trusted information needs to be provided as function of time? Use sense and respond environment as overlay for smart city. Technology is limited to what it’s supposed to do; it’s the humans that mess up (for many reasons). We know better how to do it.
Discussion: Any efforts to record and learn from this history? Part of the systems and coordinated organizational failures occur because it’s nobody’s job. There’s a need to address common problems, sounds like a command top-down structure would be helpful, but practically the emergency response starts from the ground up. Also it’s hard to determine the “one” system to mandate. Actions could be elevated to something like UN ISDR (people end of things, not technology as main solution). Military (response) approach is good for military, but doesn’t carry over cleanly to other environments. Of significance: the questions that never get asked. The 24 deficiencies will be repeated in future disasters if not brought to light!
Final observation: We all know what problems are (need for collaboration), but efforts are scattered or ineffective — no critical mass in this area yet?
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