Communications in a Disconnected Environment

By Scott P. Lewis, CEM, FPEM, Pathfinder Commander, Pathfinders Incident Management Team

How can emergency managers use affordable, rugged, flip cell phones for rapidly collecting windshield damage assessment and human need assessments when all cell service is destroyed in a manmade or natural disaster? Our Task Force found just such a solution, and now has 100 cell phones that took less than 30 minutes to train with and cost our unit peanuts to operate. When cell towers are up, the system works like a regular phone with a robust tracking system with all sorts of data collection monitors.

Hurricane Ike saw the use of some of the latest technology available, and one mobile commu­nications’ solution our team used is called Pathfinders, named after a Task Force dating back to 1999 Hurricane Floyd. With no power, no cell towers, no Internet and no fancy, expensive satellite solutions, Pathfinders Task Force (PTF) Ike was able to use its team’s flip cell phones to gather vital information and relay it to the local Emergency Operations Center for quick evaluation in one of Texas hardest hit areas. With 19 feet of storm surge, the challenges were many, but the phones performed their tasks seamlessly and the results were remarkable.

Follow-up to Katrina Lessons Learned
The mobile software technology was developed for our Pathfinders’ Incident Management Team (IMT) in a follow-up to the Lessons Learned from Katrina where 126,000 homebound survivors in just 14 days were visited by crews using Garmin GPS units, with no real documentation or communications capability. Since then and during the development phase, a simple, flip phone was selected for the team because the phones were both rugged and very affordable compared to expensive and fragile PDA’s, which also had a much more complicated learning curve for trainees. Ike was our first test of the system in a real disaster.

Rapid Training, Fast Results
In Ike, we were able to rapidly train volunteers who never had seen the software solution in less than 30 minutes. In Ike’s totally disconnected environment and on the first day of operations, we had six crews with three people each geocoded and time/date stamped4,400 rapid damage assessments using cell phones. The maps and data collected by the cell phones were vividly displayed in the local EOC. For the next six days, hundreds of volunteers went door-to-door with the 100 cell phones, collecting human needs assessment information for thousands of Ike survivors at their doorways – with the cell towers still down. The communication system was de­signed to let the team’s cell phones download by blue tooth to the Pathfinder base’s servers. How­ever, our Information Technology Section was able to have all 100 phones communicating with normal laptops by Day Three of our Ike response and with no connectivity at all.

Information Collected and Analyzed
We designed the software to prompt the user through a series of checklists on the phones when he/she visits a home to determine the welfare of the survivors and what relief they need. The volunteer enters information on the phone using drop-down boxes on 20+ questions that target household and special needs. The information is geocoded and time-stamped using the GPS data, so a follow-up crew can be sent immediately if needed. In addition to automated checklists, information can be entered in comment spaces via a text mes­sage. For instance, when a volun­teer arrives at a house and a survivor is safe and well, there is a box with this option for them to check. When checked, the volun­teer enters the name, address and phone number of the survivor. Once the volunteer has entered the appropriate information for a household, he simply presses a “submit and save” box on the phone before moving on to the next site. Pie chart snapshots then summarize thousands of data fields in easily reviewable form.

The new technology also adds features which allow for enhanced Excel spreadsheet documentation, much of which will serve in mitigating future disasters, as a host of agencies are able to analyze and manipulate the data collected from impact zones. During training sessions and in Ike response, we easily customized questionnaires on the phones to collect community-specific data that can be used for mitigation, as well as for analysis, not to mention FEMA’s requests for documentation.

For more information, contact the author at scott@theeagleswingsfoundation.org