Disaster Readiness Puts Tech Tools To The Test

Can thumb drives, mash-ups, and RSS improve our ability to react in emergencies? The organizers of two disaster simulations hope to find out.

By Larry Greenemeier, InformationWeek
Aug. 21, 2006
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192202134

San Diego this week will be the site of a massive viral outbreak that stretches emergency response efforts to their limits, as a terrorist cell unleashes a wave of cyberattacks to bring down the power grid, Internet access, and landline and cell phone connectivity. Fortunately, it's a mock exercise, a scary what-if scenario of quarantine and confusion. But no one's saying it couldn't really happen.

Hundreds of first responders and technologists will attend the event, called Strong Angel III, testing technology and techniques for coping with such a disaster. The timing is noteworthy, coming two weeks after a foiled terrorism plot in the United Kingdom and three weeks before the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

"If Katrina was any guide, we're not ready with a level of community preparedness, and cybersecurity is a part of this," says James Gilmore, who was governor of Virginia on 9/11 and chaired the Gilmore Commission, which assessed the country's ability to respond to terrorist attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. "The one thing you want to do is keep intact the telecommunications infrastructure, including both wired and wireless communication." Gilmore now chairs the Homeland Security Practice Group of law firm Kelley Drye Collier Shannon.

San Diego State University's visualization lab will serve as the nerve center for Strong Angel III

Organizer Dr. Eric Rasmussen describes Strong Angel III as "a working disaster response laboratory." The event simulates some of the conditions that Hurricane Katrina relief workers encountered a year ago at the Hancock Medical Center near Waveland, Miss., after floodwaters destroyed laboratories on the first floor and Internet connectivity was lost.

To participate, applicants submitted proposals outlining how the technology or techniques they wanted to demonstrate met more than 50 criteria established by event coordinators. The emphasis was on the intersection of social needs and technology, such as the ability of military and civilian organizations to coordinate relief, the deployment of a wireless network to assist communications, and the use of Short Message Service on GSM cell phones to locate and communicate with survivors.

People First

The first Strong Angel event in 2000 focused on better ways to respond to crises such as the refugee migration in Kosovo. Rasmussen was asked to present his findings to officials, including the secretary of the Navy and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Surgeon for the Navy's Third Fleet at the time, Rasmussen went on to draft a document with 10 "commandments," 20 recommendations, and 30 advisories outlining how the military could be more effective in humanitarian support when working with civilian relief groups.

Four years later, Strong Angel II addressed lessons learned from the Afghanistan and Iraq war zones. "What came out of this was the value of the social network becoming formalized," Rasmussen says. His team provided insight that was used to help create a Defense Department policy that directs the U.S. military to consider giving humanitarian support equal priority with combat operations.

"With Strong Angel III, we're looking for a set of tools and techniques that can improve community resilience in any area of the world," Rasmussen says. Among the technologies to be demonstrated:
>> A 4-Gbyte Kingston Technology key chain storage drive, which will be used to install about 50 programs on computers used in relief efforts, even if those computers can't access outside networks. One program would let responders send SMS messages to any cell phone. "What's unique is the way the software was compressed to fit on the drive," Rasmussen says.

>> A disaster scene mash-up based on the open source Sahana disaster management software, created by Sri Lankan programmer Chamindra de Silva. Sahana can be used to establish missing person registries, coordinate relief efforts among groups, request support, and keep track of victims in shelters. The combination of Google Earth with Sahana will create a detailed visual image of a disaster area. Google plans to work with Microsoft to ensure that the modified Sahana works with Microsoft's Virtual Earth service.

>> RSS Simple Sharing Extensions, developed by Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie. While RSS feeds are used to publish and subscribe to information, SSE allows systems to be cross-subscribed with one another, creating bidirectional RSS. "One of the major themes of Strong Angel III is sharing data across boundaries," says Robert Kirkpatrick, lead solutions architect for Microsoft Humanitarian Systems. A mesh network will be used to issue emergency requests for help. With SSE, the requests can be accessed by anyone else on the network, broadening a responder's pool of resources.

>> VSee ultralow-bandwidth, high-quality videoconferencing software, created by Milton Chen, founder of VSee Lab. It will be used for videoconferencing links among locations, including U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va., and a hospital in Afghanistan. VSee also will be part of a telemedicine demonstration.

Strong Angel III comes on the heels of a disaster-preparedness conference, called Synthetic Portland, held Aug. 18 at Portland State University and hosted by the Regional Alliances for Infrastructure and Network Security, or Rains, in Portland, Ore. Local officials, academics, and business leaders discussed a model for data sharing during an emergency. "We're in an era of unprecedented disasters, and we'd better damn well get better at responding to them," says Charles Jennings, founder of Rains and CEO of Swan Island Networks, a provider of data-sharing products and services. One idea discussed at the event was to combine mapping and communications technology in such a way that emergency management personnel could remotely link to intelligent devices in a facility and, for example, shut down a ventilation system if toxic gas were present.

Progress has been "uneven" since 9/11 when it comes to interoperability of systems used by different emergency responders, Portland CTO Matt Lampe says. "I'm not surprised," he says, "because the things we're talking about are complex and cost significant money." Replacement of communications equipment in Portland would cost as much as $100 million.

Events such as Strong Angel III and Synthetic Portland could lead to improvements in emergency preparedness. As recent events remind us, nothing's more important.