Mobile 911 in Chicago

Today Chicago executed what is being called the largest disaster/evacuation simulation ever run in the United States. One of the city's weapons used in the exercise was the new multi-million dollar mobile 911 center. This vehicle is highly impressive, with 115 telephone lines and connections into thousands of cameras around the city.

Reading about it reminds me of Jack Bauer on 24. It also reminds me of a recent entry I wrote about the 2006 Intergraph Conference, where I got a chance to speak about the role of Persistent Group Messaging in disaster recovery situations. The core concepts covered in the above entry are related to coordinating teams of people, some on-site and some remote, and some entering the conversation after others but still needing the full context of the situation. But there are a couple other things I have heard recently about disaster scenarios that are somewhat alarming. They are:

1. Keeping track of people: I have read reviews of recent disaster responses where one of the biggest challenges was communicating between agencies and keeping track of where assets and people are deployed. This is something that can be done at large scale with the use of secure chat rooms integrated with geospatial and map data.
2. Limitations of voice: A colleague told me a story about visiting the DHS after the Katrina disaster. The story was about walking into a command center and seeing lots and lots of phones, all w/ people talking on the other end, all sitting on the desk being un-heard because it is impossible for a human to pay attention to that many voices at one time. Again, this is an area where text-based persistent messaging can help, because with the help of alerts and intelligent consumption features it is possible to participate in hundreds of conversations simultaneously.

Some day, hopefully we will see some of these relatively cheap technologies deployed in the mobile 911 units and disaster response command centers.

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