People, power emphasized in Strong Angel III exercise
By Paul F. Roberts
August 28, 2006, INFOWORLD
Dr. Eric Rasmussen checks out disasters almost as frequently as the rest of us check out Hollywood blockbusters.
In just the past few years, Rasmussen, who is an active-duty commander in the U.S. Navy and chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Navy Medical Center in Bremerton, Wash., served on the ground in Bosnia, just after the siege of Sarajevo in 1996; as a physician with the USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) at a Sudanese refugee camp in Kenya; in Kuwait during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, then in Baghdad and Basra after the invasion. After coming back home, Rasmussen was deployed with Joint Task Force Katrina in New Orleans.
So when Rasmussen set out to plan Strong Angel III, a large-scale exercise in “integrated disaster response” held in San Diego last week, he knew how to make it authentic: from the bombed-out building where the event was staged to the rescue workers’ proximity to San Diego’s airport, where the roar of flying jets made communication difficult (a detail he borrowed from his experience after the 2004 tsunami in Banda Aceh, Indonesia).
Strong Angel III, which imagined trade show attendees caught up in the fallout of a deadly disease outbreak and infrastructure-crippling cyberattack, attracted interest from across the tech sector. But Rasmussen told InfoWorld Senior Editor Paul F. Roberts that technology is a window dressing in most disaster recovery efforts, where restoring electrical power then building trust and credibility are the most pressing tasks.
InfoWorld: You were on the ground in New Orleans during Katrina. What lessons from that disaster did you incorporate into Strong Angel III?
Eric Rasmussen: What we found originally was a situation where we had no power, where it was hot and dirty, and we had no communications that worked. The cell towers were down, the FM radio stations, mostly, were down. So it was extremely difficult to communicate with the population and more difficult to communicate with the leadership about what the population required. Eventually it unfolded into something effective. But it was complicated and difficult, and many things could have been simplified across so many organizations.
IW: How did you re-create that feel at Strong Angel III?
ER: On site, we have an old, badly damaged building. There’s no power, water, lighting. It’s open and exposed to the elements in great part. We have a scenario where people are thrown together here for a trade show and bad things happen over a day and a half. There’s no cell reception, power and lighting have failed, and there’s a pandemic, so there’s a need for quarantine and a requirement for resilient communications, lift [transportation], and power, which are the three things that fail most often.
IW: And what have your experiences taught you about how to respond to such situations?
ER: One thing we’ve learned is that data flow and information are almost of secondary importance. The root issue is power. If I have power, there are a great number of different modalities that I can use. Without it, there’s little I can do for very long. Batteries run out. So we have lots of crank stuff, hand-wound stuff.
IW: You chose to stage a combined pandemic and cyberattack. Why did you choose that scenario as opposed to a storm or a terrorist attack?
ER: We didn’t want to have bodies on the pavement. You always see that with disaster drills, but mass casualties are not usually the problem. Usually what you have is a population that’s in tact, but unhappy. They want food and water. Our dominant issue is how to serve an affected population. Social networks, cultural understanding, and languages are all more important than the technology.
IW: What lessons can IT managers take away from Strong Angel III?
ER: Power is more fragile than you think. Your employees are less reliable than you might prefer. In a disaster, people prefer to take care of their families or they themselves are affected or their mode of transportation is impeded. So you’ve got to offer reassurance and establish trust between some authority and the affected population.
