It is hard to pick up a paper or listen to the news without being reminded of the ever-increasing amount of natural and manmade disasters occurring in today’s world. Currently, there are reports of tornadoes and flooding in the Midwest; at the end of summer, we’ll see the focus on hurricanes; and spattered throughout the year wild fires, earthquakes, and tsunamis inevitably hit the news. Mother Nature is not the only disaster-causing agent throughout our growing global framework. Industrial accidents and other related workplace incidents resulting in emergency situations spill over into the surrounding communities. Our world faces an escalation of workplace violence, civil disobedience, and terrorist attacks which threaten citizens in public settings. The effects of these rising catastrophic events are devastating to the associated populations and organizations. Effective planning, response, and two-way communication are essential in limiting the impact of disasters.
In days gone by, government agencies, commercial enterprises, and other organizations responsible for the safety and security of the populations they serve relied upon outbound alerting systems to notify people of an impending or ongoing disaster. But in today’s complex environment, it is not enough to simply notify a population of emanate danger – it takes more. In fact, even the process of notifying the population has become more complex. With the advent and proliferation of mobile phones, it has become increasingly difficult to notify individuals based on home or work locations. The once-static population is constantly on the move. So, how do we go about solving the communication gap during an emergency?
First, emergency response centers must have a unified communications capability. The technologies currently exists to simultaneously notify a population through multiple channels to ensure that the majority of those affected get the word that a disaster is about to happen or is in progress. These alerting systems integrate with and use a multi-modal approach to alerting – tying in standard and mobile phones, text messages, email, social media, and intrusive notifications to desktop and mobile computing devices. In addition, they link to traditional alerting systems already in place for mass notification such as sirens, strobe lights, public address systems, digital signage and others. With one click of a button, all affected individuals get an authoritative notification through multiple communication devices to ensure information gets through even if they are in a noisy or isolated area.
Next, those responsible for the safety and security of those they serve need to know three important things: who got the message, who didn’t, and who needs help. That’s why an interactive solution is so important. Simply blasting out a message during an emergency is not enough. To effectively manage a response, emergency managers need an acknowledgement that the message got through to ensure that those impacted have taken cover, evacuated the area, or were not in the area at all. They then can focus their attention on those who need assistance and those who did not respond to ensure that they do not need help. Two-way communication allows emergency managers to pinpoint the need and respond quickly with the limited resources at their disposal. Focused, rapid response is a key element to preventing further loss of life, injury, or property damage.
As advanced mobile technology has become more pervasive, it has become an important tool for emergency response. Emergency managers rely on all sorts of sensors to survey for, prevent, and respond to threats. They traditionally relied upon static devices such as cameras, intrusion detection alarms, weather alerting systems, etc. for the intelligence necessary to prevent, control, and contain an emergency. Today, networked crisis communication systems can add people to the emergency manager’s arsenal of sensors. Using their mobile phone and an installed application, every person at the scene of an incident can take photos, videos, audio, or text and relay them to the emergency response center for up-to-the-second geotagged intelligence of the ongoing event as it unfolds to assist in the response and resolution of the crisis at hand.
Coordinating the response has also become more complicated in today’s world. In most post-disaster evaluations, the single most important failure point was interagency communication. Few emergencies occur in isolation which require a response from a number of federal, state, and local agencies; commercial enterprises; non-governmental relief agencies; and other organizations. The ability of agencies to communicate with each other is the biggest compelling need to effectively respond to disasters on a local, regional, or national scale. Traditional interagency communications systems have been cumbersome, complicated, and slow when employed in critical situations. Today, advances in networked crisis communications use of secure cloud and a social network framework enhance emergency communication to bridge the gap in interagency communications. Now, with the touch of a button, agencies can alert, communicate, and collaborate with each other using the same platform that they use to communicate with internal notification recipient during a crisis. This innovation in interagency connectivity enables an organization to coordinate an effective interagency response to a catastrophe, saving lives in the process.
We can no longer react to emergencies after they happen in a global environment of increasing threats. Governments, commercial enterprises, and other organizations responsible for the safety and security of their populations must advance their crisis communications systems to take advantage of technology which has revolutionized the industry. No longer can we simply scream and hope using traditional mass alerting systems. It is time to implement a system that cannot only alert those in danger, but also account for them, collect information from the field, and connect all the agencies responding into a unified, effective communication system to plan, respond, and recover from disaster situations.
John Linstrom is community manager, public safety, at AtHoc, Inc. He has spent the past 30 years in military, municipal, special district, state, and federal government agencies as an emergency manager, emergency responder, and team commander. Linstrom is currently the federal team commander for the 85-person National Disaster Medical System mass fatalities response team (DMORT) serving the Western U.S. and Pacific states and territories. Linstrom frequently serves as a planning and operations specialist in the HHS Secretary’s Operations Center on large, novel, or complex incidents. Linstrom holds board certification in fire protection, homeland security, and emergency management. He was named a Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers in 2014. He graduated with an M.A. degree in emergency and disaster management in 2015.
