incident.blog

Wired Magazine expands on the story of Dan Wooley, an American filmmaker whose iPhone helped him survive 65 hours buried in a collapsed hotel in Haiti, even without a connection.

Wooley referred to a first-aid app on the phone to confirm how he should treat his injuries. He used the alarm clock to keep him awake lest he fall into shock. He used the focusing light to help him find a stable void in the hotel rubble where he could wait to be rescued. He also recorded voice notes to his family and listened to music.

“For people who pointed out I should’ve had a pocket first aid kit, the reason they’re wrong is I wouldn’t have it in my pocket,” he said. “How many people have gone out of their way to add one more thing to their pocket? What was valuable about the iPhone is it was already in my pocket.” – Dan Wooley quoted in WIRED

That’s the key point, I think. We can wish for folks to carry around extra gear in their pockets and special training in their heads, but for the most part that’s unrealistic. JIT training tools like that first aid and CPR app won’t save everyone, but they can help a lot of folks.

Slashdot highlights this story from the London Sun:

Desperate dad Leroy Smith resorted to Google with the request “how to deliver a baby” when his wife went into labour… Mr Smith called a midwife for advice but before she arrived Emma, 25, began having powerful contractions. So the 29-year-old grabbed hold of his BlackBerry, accessed the internet and sought help from search engine Google for step-by-step instructions. And after following the detailed guide on the internet’s wikiHow Emma safely gave birth to daughter 6lb 11oz Mahalia Merita Angela Smith.

The Sun has its tongue firmly planted in its editorial cheek, painting Mr. Smith as a clueless geek. But I see a practical example of network-centric emergency response.

We emergency professionals like to wag our fingers at the public for not embracing our priorities and training themselves ahead of time in how to deal with whatever exigency is on the tops of our minds. I understand the frustration, but it strikes me as a weak sort of professionalism. Even if we’re actually smarter than everyone else, that doesn’t really help get the job done, does it?

(Just for fun, let’s imagine for a moment that most grown-ups are actually fairly competent in budgeting their own attention, based on their own experiences and beliefs. In such a world, might repeated attempts to impose our own priorities seem presumptuous at best and abusive at worst? It’s just a thought.)

So if we can’t enforce a comprehensive personal preparedness curriculum on everyone, what’s second best? Well, for the Smiths it was having a handy pocket-sized digital reference to… well, to pretty much anything that might come up.

Anyone can dream up hypothetical scenarios in which Google or a Blackberry won’t be available, of course, but that misses the point. What matters is that a growing number of folks will have access to that sort of just-in-time learning tools. And in a disaster the people who can solve own problems will be that many fewer problems for us.

So let’s keep on training and educating and beating the drum about whatever hazard we’re funded for this week. But maybe we can also make practical just-in-time learning resources easy for folks to find and use when they decide they need them.

Jonas Landgren’s blog takes a sharp look at the much-bandied notion of a Common Operational Picture:

The common operating picture is not in the map, but in the interactions where some form of common understanding is interpreted and negotiated.

It happened that I was back in D.C. last week, where I spent some time chatting with a GIS-oriented colleague about this very question. It’s closely related to another buzz-term we toss around with more vigor than rigor: “situational awareness.”

In both cases I’m afraid what used to be technical terms have been absorbed into marketing- and proposal-speak and have lost much of their actual meaning. (For folks interested in understanding what’s actually known about situational awareness… what it comprises, how it’s achieved and what it’s good for… I’ll recommend the writings of Dr. Mica Endsley, especially her book “Designing for Situational Awareness.” Turns out there’s a lot more to it than just projecting maps on a large screen.)

Underlying these particular bits of jargon is an error that’s bedeviled emergency management for many years, even before the current post-9/11 American militarismo: A tendency to confuse our tactics with our goals, our means with our ends.

Both “situational awareness” (SA) and “common operational picture” (COP) have become objects of this ends/means inversion. Neither SA nor a COP is an end in itself. What we’re really hoping to achieve is better decisions. The implicit assumption in much of the current homeland-security / emergency-management literature is that map-based COPs are the key to making improved decisions. But as Jonas’ article reminds us, that’s only an assumption.

The problem with the map-centered approach is that a lot of interesting parameters of use in the detection and management of emergencies aren’t geographic in dimensions. Many of them are much more appropriately charted against time, or proportionally, or against demographic or economic parameters, and so on.

For example, one of the most useful displays I saw on the giant video screens of Florida’s state EOC last year was a very simple line graph showing the volume of auto traffic crossing a single freeway sensor loop. It showed vividly the onset, peak and diminishment of evacuation traffic. In a glance it showed that, at the point I saw it, the majority of folks who were going to move had already done so. It would also have been useful to see that particular sensing location plotted on a map, but even without any geospatial information at all, it was highly meaningful in a way that a map depiction of current traffic at a particular point wouldn’t be.

My narrow point isn’t that maps are bad, but only that they aren’t the answer to every question. My broader point is that we need to resist the temptation to let particular solutions become ends in themselves and lose focus on our actual goals.

(And for folks interested in the wide range of ways visual presentations can support decisionmaking… including but going far beyond just maps… I’ll recommend the books of Edward Tufte, especially “The Visual Display of Quantative Information.” For a quick read-in on how life-safety critical this stuff can be, take a look at Tufte’s analysis of how a poorly-crafted PowerPoint presentation obscured critical information that might have prevented the Challenger space shuttle disaster.)

This morning at the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) conference in Newark, NJ our keynote speaker was the Chief Information Officer for New York City, Gino Menchini. Among a number of interesting observations from his experience in 9/11 and other disasters, he reported that NYC has re-centralized a number of critical departmental IT functions on grounds of disaster resilience.

Distributed-systems purists might dismiss this as mere bureaucratic opportunism on the part of a mainframe-and-Windows oriented IT department. However, Mr. Menchini offers a couple of salient justifications.

First, he said, the departmental servers and network infrastructures simply haven’t been built to the standards maintained at the central IT shop. And second, he reported, in severe emergencies like 9/11, physically getting the departmental sysops to all their various departmental centers to perform maintenance can become a problem.

(That latter reminds me of the problems several broadcast engineers in the Bay Area had getting to their transmitter sites after the Loma Prieta earthquake back in ‘89, and more recently in New Orleans after Katrina. In fact, almost every emergency that triggers access controls seems to spawn some sort of secondary problem like this.)

New York City is, of course, one of the ultimate examples of urbanization. I wonder whether this might be another indication of some basic differences between the emergency-management (and other) realities of urban centers and those of edge cities, suburbia and rural America. As in politics and many other aspects of our culture, there seem to be some basic differences between a pastoral, self-contained vision of agrarian society and a more interdependent, tightly meshed and highly connected urban style.

(Tags: emergency, disaster, communication)