New Mobile Technology Helping Emergency Management

By Keith Carson, Disaster Reservist

I was amazed recently to hear about 4,389 geo-coded, time/date tamped, colorcoded rapid damage assessments done in just 6 hours by 6 crews during Hurricane Ike, with no cell towers, no Internet, and no power. Wanting to know more, I tracked down the man responsible for this feat,
and thought others needed to know about it too.

I had the opportunity to speak at length with Scott Lewis, President of the Eagles Wings Foundation, and head of the Pathfinders Task Force who has come up with a way that emergency managers and other personnel an use affordable, rugged, flip cell phones to rapidly conduct windshield damage assessments and human needs assessments, even when cellular service is not working following a disaster. Recently this system lso
migrated into the Blackberry Curve, with or without a camera.

The Eagles Wings Foundation has more than 100 cell phones for this type of operation. Lewis told me that while deployed to Hurricane Ike, some of the latest technology available was used successfully. The system is called Pathfinders, named after a Task Force dating back to Hurricane Floyd in 1999.

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 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 any, but the phones performed their tasks seamlessly, and the results were remarkable” Lewis told me.

The mobile software technology was developed for the Pathfinders’ Management Team as a result of the “lessons learned” from Katrina, where in just 14 days, 126,000 homebound survivors were visited by their crews using Garmin GPS units, with no real documentation or communications capability. Since then, and during the development phase, a military spec, 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 the first test of the system in a real disaster. Lewis told me that while in Texas they 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, 6 crews with 3 people each geo-coded and time/date stamped 4,400 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 100 cell phones collecting human needs
assessment information from 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 be downloaded by Bluetooth to the
Pathfinder base’s servers.

However, their Information Technology Section was able to have all 100 phones communicating with normal laptops by day three of their Ike response, and with no connectivity at all. When cell towers are up, the system works like a regular phone, with a real live time, robust tracking system and all sorts of data collection monitors.

They 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 more than 20 questions that target household and special needs, and the information is geo-coded and time-stamped using the GPS data, so a follow-up crew can be sent immediately if needed. This entire systems was focused to support this emergency response team which relies primarily on unaffiliated volunteers to support its operations.

In addition to automated checklists, information can be entered in comment spaces by a text message. For example, 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/she 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 an 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 full scale exercises and in Ike, they easily customized questionnaires on the phones to collect community specific data which could be used for mitigation and analysis, not to mention FEMA’s requests for documentation.

To learn more, I would suggest you contact Scott Lewis directly. You can also visit the non-profit’s web site to see how their Task Force has taken advantage of this cutting edge technology to support their operations.