This is the third in a series of blogs that have taken a look at natural disaster communications and how public safety organizations around the world a leveraging next generation communications to better prepare and respond to emergencies.
In this final installment, the focus is on the Canadian city of Calgary which had catastrophic flooding in June. But it also got lucky.
That’s because just as the worst flooding in the history of the city was overflowing the riverbanks and flooding downtown, taking down infrastructure as it went, Calgary was testing its new, next-generation IP/MPLS-based network infrastructure.
As its infrastructure was endangered by the flooding, the city’s IT team was able to move over to this new system and start the migration of 50 remote locations in a matter of hours, preserving its essential communications needed to deal with the flooding and preserve business continuity.
“The new network was in the testing phase,” noted a recent Alcatel-Lucent LifeTalk blog posting by the team that worked with Calgary. “The transition for getting everyone on it was supposed to take a year and a half. But in this case, the effort started happening immediately.”
The new network, while untested until the crisis, helped the city stay operational when it probably would not have otherwise, according to post.
“It validated that what we had planned, what we had received, what we had put in place – the redundancy and the resiliency,” noted the authors. .
Natural disasters are inherently chaotic an unpredictable. To enable natural disaster communications that can withstand such unpredictability takes a resilient network that’s secure, fluid and flexible – characteristics that are strongly supported by IP/MPLS.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent LifeTalk
“IP/MPLS immediately gives you the capabilities to integrate data, video and voice,” noted Steven Jennings, executive director of public safety for Alcatel-Lucent, in another recent LifeTalk posting on the subject. “It lets you load-balance all of your resources because it’s agnostic to the underlying transport technologies.”
He added: “It doesn’t really care about your network topology, whether you’re star or point-to-point, you can provision services rapidly no matter what is thrown at you, and it gives you common operational management and administration tools that work across the whole network.”
Emergency response personnel need to focus on the disaster at hand, not their equipment. And that requires a network that is robust enough.
The City of Calgary was lucky enough to have such a network in place when the flooding struck, aiding its natural disaster communications and ensuring that while it may have been the worst flooding in the city’s history, it didn’t need to be the most damaging.
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Middle Eastern revolutions and national ad campaigns are not the only situations that benefit from social media. Natural disaster communications also can be greatly helped by effectively harnessing the opportunities of social media.
“Communication reliability depends upon how we engage through the media, and new media is the conduit through which we negotiate those relationships,” noted Marya L. Doerfel Ph.D., an associate professor at Rutgers University who focuses on natural disaster communications in a recent Alcatel-Lucent LifeTalk article, Social Media, Relationships Boost Emergency Communications.
“In the aftermath of Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, which struck the U.S. East Coast in 2012, organizations at all levels relied on those kinds of relationships,” she said. “It became apparent that those which included citizen-based communication platforms in their repertoire – texting in the case of Katrina – were able to gather more intelligence about what was going on.”
Let’s face it, as a series of LifeTalk articles poses, “What’s the one thing you can’t do without in a natural disaster?”
Source: Alcatel-Lucent LifeTalk e-Zine
Effective natural disaster communications not only is about sending out information to citizens, but also about connecting with those in the community who have been impacted and gathering actionable information from this network to help guide relief efforts.
There are two sides to this from an emergency communications perspective: Technologically, there needs to be a way to connect with social media and ingest it for analysis and response. But just as important is the ability to filter key data among the noise. More data by itself can just confuse a situation.
“Emergency response and all public safety agencies need to consider whether they have communications professionals on board so that someone can just manage and interpret that in real-time – thinking about where it is coming from, and what are the hot spots,” noted Doerfel. “How do we deal with the scale of data in real time? In any instance we need to boil it down to common themes as the information pours in. Those main themes will get repeated and iterated though this social media.”
Social media skills need to be more than just something that young emergency personnel possess; increasingly it is becoming fundamental to effective natural disaster communications.
When Katrina hit, things like taking advantage of text messaging made a huge difference.
“The solution to the challenge is not the social media itself, but the adaptability you bring to it,” noted Doerfel. “Resilience is in large part the ability to be adaptable and flexible in the heat of the moment.”
Even if disaster relief operations are not yet savvy when it comes to social media, the need for adaptability and flexibility is well understood.
It might be an understatement to say that Harris County in Texas takes its public safety first-responder communications seriously.
The county, which encompasses the fourth largest city in the United States, Houston, also is home to the country’s petrochemical industry. The county also is no stranger to natural disasters. Hurricanes are common for the area, and big one named Hurricane Ike ripped through the region in 2008. In fact, Hurricane Ike was the third most costly storm in U.S. history, and $60 million has gone toward the recovery effort with another $100 million committed for the future.
As a result, natural disaster communications for enabling not just fast response during a crisis but also for preparations and dealing with the aftermath has been recognized as a top priority. The county believes that to best protect its citizens and give first-responders the capabilities they need to work in a high-performance manners is to have a communications network that is second to none. A next generation public safety communications network is the one thing they know they cannot do without when a natural disaster strikes.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent LifeTalk e-Zine
“Communications is the single most important factor – the most critical element during emergencies and disaster situations,” Mark Sloan, Harris County’s emergency management coordinator, said in another recent LifeTalk article, Harris County: Investing in Communications to Protect Millions of Texans. “It’s something that we focus on and realize is critical to our partners. Timely, accurate information and warnings to allow people to take the appropriate actions, and then manage recovery, help us fulfill our responsibilities to protect property and saves lives.”
But having a good first responder communications network is not easy for the county. It is a big challenge. In fact, its natural disaster warning and response communications system includes communicating with more than 4 million residents, 34 jurisdictions, 54 fire departments and 125 law enforcement agencies.
The county relies upon a digital microwave radio network that has a fully redundant core topology based on Internet Protocol and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (IP/MPLS), according to the blog post profiling the network. If an outage happens anywhere in the network, traffic is automatically rerouted over an alternate network path, providing those numerous governmental departments and partners with resiliency, flexibility and expandability.
The county works hard to stay up on the latest technology, knowing that the pace of innovation gives it an opportunity to always up its game.
“We continually look at where the county stands in terms of technologies that are being utilized, the enhancements that have been created in the marketplace during that budget cycle,” Sloan said. “We then determine where we’re going in our three- to five-year strategic planning processes. We want to make sure that we’re getting the value that we need, and that we’re dealing with our trusted partners who have developed technologies for many years and work with us on a regular basis.”
For instance, Houston and the Greater Harris County 911 network at one point asked if they could be a part of the county’s microwave tower system. They worked to understand the needs, and then increased bandwidth in order to partner with the rest of the region as the system was building out. It ultimately made the county’s first responders communications network more efficient. Each agency saved significant amounts of money while expanding their coverage.
“Technology is essential in everything that we do today,” Sloan said. “We can’t do our job without it, so we need to work with our vendors to identify solutions, both now and in the future, that make sense for emergency response and disaster recovery. We need to lean forward together to identify those future challenges.”