34 35Global Identification - March 2009 www.global-identification.com34 35Global Identification - March 2009 www.global-identification.com

by David C. Wyld, Southeastern

Louisiana University

memories as the monikers of killer hurricanes that have impacted all across the Gulf Coast. Each has been dev-astating, exacting billions in property damage and a hor-rible loss of life.

Hurricane Katrina

In late August 2005, Hur-ricane Katrina became the real-world test for many years of emergency preparedness planning efforts. An estimat-ed one million people evac-

uated the southeastern part of Louisiana in anticipation of Katrina’s landfall. How-ever, approximately 25,000 residents of the city did not evacuate. Many chose to stay to protect their homes and personal property, while others simply were unable to leave due to their immobil-ity, a lack of transportation, or just their belief that in the end, they would be “all right.” In fact, many stayed due to the fact that in the years leading-up to Katrina, mandatory evacuations had

EGOVERNMENT

One of the most overused man-agement axioms in all organiza-

tions is that “people are our most important asset.” However, over the course of the past few years, this state-ment has been put to the absolute test for state and local government officials throughout the Gulf Coast region of the United States. A litany of previously innocent names ‒ Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike ‒ are now indelibly burned into our collective

How innovative leaders are leveraging RFID in public-private partnerships to improve

the hurricane evacuation process and provide real-time business intelligence not just

to government agencies, but to friends and loved ones as well

Category 5 identification

photo by TopTechWriter.US

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been ordered for Hurricanes Georges (1998) and Floyd (1999), both of which fortu-nately passed east of their forecasted paths, causing little to no damage to the New Orleans area itself. Yet, Katrina did closely follow its projected path, striking just to the east of New Orleans. As we now know, for all too many of these individuals, Hurricane Katrina produced tragic results. In the end, an estimated 1,600 to 1,800 lives were lost from the storm in New Orleans alone.

Out of every tragedy how-ever does come good, and in this case, lessons were learned. They were learned by individuals all along the Gulf Coast, who had wit-nessed the devastation both first-hand and through 24/7 news coverage of the event. So, when Hurricane Rita threatened just a month later, an estimated 2.7 Texas and Louisiana residents evacuated, making this the largest migration of indi-viduals to date in American history. The 2005 hurricanes also served as all too real wake-up calls for emergency planners as to the need for better planning and execu-tion of evacuations of whole regions of states and major cities within them. Ozlem Ergun, who is the co-Direc-tor of the Research Center for Humanitarian Logistics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, recently com-mented that: “Evacuation planning is very complicat-ed. Given how bad the 2005 hurricane season process was, it is evident that there

is a big need for this to be done in a systematic way.”

Evacuation planning

Proper evacuation planning can help save thousands of lives and hundreds of mil-lions of dollars. Yet, the un-

predictable nature of any storm also makes effective decision making difficult. In fact, as shown in the figure on the next page, there is what might be referred to as a lifecycle to potential di-sasters, as there are distinct stages to any potential di-saster potentially requiring a mass evacuation for emer-gency managers and pub-lic officials to go through. In the hurricane scenario, emergency planners have to work with forecast tracks and models to make their all-important calls on when and what areas to evacuate, fully cognizant that their de-cisions, made in the isolation of an emergency operations center, have very real-world costs and consequences for hundreds of thousands ‒ even millions ‒ of citizens. As Chief Jack Colley, Chief of the Texas Governor’s Di-vision of Emergency Man-agement (GDEM) recently observed, “We live in a 72 hour world, from decision to evacuation.” Further, there is always the uncertainty as to exactly who will need as-

sistance in such a scenario. As has been seen in the re-cent hurricanes, hundreds of thousands of individuals and families will elect to evacu-ate on their own, using their private cars and other forms of transportation to travel outside the “cone of uncer-tainty” for an approaching

storm, bearing the cost ‒ and responsibility ‒ for their own transport and shelter in a safe location. After the storm passes, they also can make their own decision as to when to come home to the affected region ‒ subject to the opening-up of the area by their state and local officials. However, in cities such as Houston and New Orleans, many thousands of individuals will need gov-ernment assistance to evac-uate the danger zone, to be sheltered in a safe area, and then be transported back to the affected area when it is declared “safe.” Many will need special assistance due to their medical condi-

The unpredictable nature of any storm makes effective evacuation-related decision making difficult

photo by Tidewater Muse

Proper evacuation planning

can help save thousands

of lives and hundreds

of millions of dollars

34 35Global Identification - March 2009 www.global-identification.com

36 Global Identification - March 2009

an evacuation management system for the State of Tex-as. The solution, the Texas Special Needs Evacuation

Tracking System (SNETS), was tested in simulations and then activated in antici-pation of Hurricane Dean in 2007, a storm that threat-ened the state’s coastline, but turned toward Mexico before any call for evacua-tions was made. However, in 2008, the system was uti-lized for the first time for both Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, monitoring the evacu-ation of over 30,000 Texas residents from the storms. SNETS involves several pri-vate sector partners, includ-ing: Motorola, Radiant RFID, Alien Technology and AT&T Wireless.

SNETS works in the following manner. Once an evacuation ordered is issued by the gov-ernor, Texas residents desir-ing state-assistance in the process are directed to meet at pre-determined “embar-kation centers.” Adults and children will then be out-fitted with RFID-enabled wristbands and they will be scanned and have their essential personal data en-tered into the system. As they board and then exit buses equipped with GPS tracking systems, evacuees will pass through portable RFID portals. Buses will take them first to what are known

as central evacuation hubs, where they will either be sheltered or ushered onto another bus for a trip to their final destination point, based on the space available at potential shelter locations and the projected path of the storm. With the integra-tion of RFID at the points of departure and reception, the SNETS system will be able to know “who is where” throughout the evacuation process, with a capacity of taking-in 12,000 people per hour into the system.

New Orleans City Assisted Evacuation Plan

The City of New Orleans has developed a similar RFID-based evacuation system. In the spring of 2006, the city initiated the City Assisted Evacuation Plan (CAEP). The main objectives of the CAEP were now to safely evacuate all residents out of New Or-leans before the winds from a hurricane reached the tropical storm-force level and to keep family units to-gether throughout the en-tire evacuation process. The City of New Orleans selected Unisys as the primary con-tractor for the project. New Orleans has encouraged its residents to preregister for their potential evacuation needs by calling the city’s 3-1-1 Public Information Emer-gency Hotline, providing their personal data and in-formation about the special needs they might have due to their age and/or medi-cal conditions. This affords emergency planning staff

eGovernment tions, their age and even

their present status (prison-ers, hospital patients, the el-derly and infirm, and nursing

home residents all require evacuation and sheltering), furthering complicating the evacuation management task and the costs involved in the operation.

Business intelligence in emergency evacuation processes

Today, both the State of Texas and the City of New Orleans have new emer-gency evacuation processes in place. These new systems, both developed in the af-termath of Hurricane Ka-trina, emphasize the need for business intelligence throughout the disaster management lifecycle. As Dr. Gordon Wells, Program Manager at the Center for Space Research at the Uni-versity of Texas at Austin - which manages the data for the Texas program - recently observed that: “The scale of mass evacuation demands a new approach to command control and the creation of a system that registers evacu-ees in real-time at their de-parture points.”

In 2006, Texas Governor Rick Perry charged the Governor’s Division of Emergency Man-agement (GDEM) to create

The disaster management

lifecycle

In some cities, many thousands of individuals will need government assistance to evacuate the danger zone

37www.global-identification.com

to anticipate the number and health status of the in-dividuals who will need city-assisted evacuation services in the event of a call for a mandatory evacuation. New Orleans’s CAEP is designed to be activated 54 hours prior to the point at which the hurricane forecasters believe tropical force winds would reach the city. At that juncture, the mayor would call for a mandatory evacu-ation of New Orleans. The City’s EOC (Emergency Op-eration Center) then would deploy buses throughout the city to pickup preregis-tered evacuees at their pre-determined pickup stops. Buses would also be sent to other locations, to be an-nounced in the media, for those residents who had not preregistered with the 3-1-1 system. Before boarding the buses at the pickup loca-tions, medical technicians will conduct a quick medical assessment of each evacuee. The buses then take evacu-ees to an evacuation center, where they would receive an RFID-encoded wristband and be officially entered into the Evacuation Tracking Sys-tem (ETS). From the evacu-ation centers, evacuees will be directed to state-pro-vided buses, trains, and pos-sibly planes. The evacuees’ destinations will be shel-ters operated by the State of Louisiana in the central and northern regions of the state, far enough from New Orleans to house the evacu-ees in a far-safer location than in their home city. The CAEP is designed to handle a volume of 20,000 evacuees

‒ and their pets ‒ to begin the recovery and repopula-tion phase as they return back to the affected area after the storm has passed, once it is safe to do so.

Analysis Who will benefit from the investment in these new systems? Certainly, the stakeholders include not just government personnel, from emergency planners to law enforcement to first responders, but evacuees and their families as well. Using business intelligence concepts, the entire process can be much more effec-tively managed, producing a more orderly and comfort-able experience for evacu-ees. At the same time, the evacuation, sheltering, and repopulation process can be conducted with real-time intelligence, benefitting all parties. Texas’ Jack Colley commented on the value of such real-time intelligence, stating that with such sys-tems, “we control the event, the event does not control us.” Chris Hill, who is Vice President for Government Solutions for AT&T Wireless

in a 24-hour period, and it is scalable to handle more people in the need with the addition of not just more technology, but more volun-teer staff at the evacuation centers and shelters.

The New Orleans system is designed where all family members are registered in the system around a “head-of-household” concept, in-cluding the family’s pets. The idea is to create a “hu-man manifest” within the Evacuation Tracking System (ETS) ‒ the database at the heart of the system ‒ one that tracks evacuees as they are moved away from the area and housed in shelters. In fact, one of the important “lessons learned” from Hurri-cane Katrina was that many people refused to evacuate New Orleans due to the fact that at that time, they would have had to leave their pets behind. Under both New Orleans’ CAEP and Texas’ SNETS, residents bring their dogs or cats with them to the evacuation center. The pets are then placed in car-riers that bear RFID tags (New Orleans) or given an RFID-enabled dog or cat collar (Texas), so that they too can be tracked as they are moved to specially-des-ignated pet shelters. Now, with the new systems in place, family members and those concerned about their safety can quickly locate each other if they are sepa-rated in the evacuation pro-cess and quickly know that their loved ones, including their pets, are safe. They can also reunite with each other

photo by shawnblog

photo by Coast Guard News

An efficient evacuation

system effectively tracks each

evacuee’s location while

reducing the need to conduct

extensive search-and-rescue

missions that risk lives

Once an evacuation order

is issued, residents desiring

state-assistance can directed

to meet at pre-determined

“embarkation centers”

where they are equipped

with RFID wristbands

38 Global Identification - March 2009

‒ a major partner in the new Texas system, recently com-mented that: “State and local agencies will benefit from collaborative solutions such as this one, because they will provide citizens with an

efficient evacuation system that effectively tracks each evacuee’s location while re-ducing the need to conduct extensive search-and-rescue missions that risk lives.” In like fashion, Kenneth Rat-tan, cofounder of Austin, Texas-based Radiant RFID, a major partner in the Texas’ system, remarked on the value of such systems to evacuees and their families: “Not all people think about, or have the capacity to call, their next of kin to let them know where they are going during an evacuation. Dur-ing Hurricane Rita, it some-times took relatives weeks to find evacuated people. In Gustav, it took minutes or seconds to find people who were being tracked with the new system.”

While states and even oth-er large cities/counties all along the coastal regions of the United States are certainly looking at the sys-tems already deployed and proven successful in Texas and Louisiana as working models of what they them-selves need for their own evacuation plans, the prin-cipal challenge to making

such systems widely avail-able across the country is, of course, the current eco-nomic conditions. Faced with declining tax revenues and budget shortfalls, state and local governments are

being forced to cut-back not just on IT spending, but on what have heretofore been essential services and pro-grams. Thus, the “essential-ness” of such projects could be lessened in the wake of what are perceived to be more immediately pressing needs.

Also, as such systems are de-ployed by various states and municipal governments, one must point out the ob-vious need for some stan-dardization of protocols and interoperability between the systems. As has been shown in these mass evacu-ation events in recent years, people are often moved through perhaps several states before reaching their final sheltering destina-tion ‒ often using multiple modes of transportation and being housed by mul-tiple public and private enti-ties. Thus, whether through cooperation between these various agencies or perhaps or through the creation of a single federal system/data-base that could be used “on demand” by any govern-ment agency, the need for such systems to not become

information silos, but rather, to be interoperable - with seamless integration to pro-vide the real-time people-business intelligence that is needed in such fast-moving emergency situations ‒ will need to be addressed in the very near future.

And on a final note, as many emergency management experts have pointed out, today, we are focused on the need for mass evacua-tion due to hurricane dan-gers along the Southern and Eastern Coasts of the United States. However, the need for plans for mass evacuation of populated regions extends nationwide ‒ even globally. With very real threats from natural disasters (such as earthquakes, wildfires, and floods) and the continu-ing potential for biological and nuclear terror attacks, every major city and all 50 states need to have not just mass evacuation planning in place, but the real-time in-telligence systems to moni-tor, track and provide es-sential information to public officials and family members as well. As has been proven by the recent spate of severe hurricanes actually strik-ing the Texas and Louisiana coasts, people really are our most important asset. Thus, the marketplace for solu-tions providers in this area should prove promising over the next decade, as in an in-creasingly dangerous world, the need for real-time intelli-gence to effectively manage the four stages of a disaster management lifecycle will not soon abate.

eGovernment

With RFID, the evacuation,

sheltering, and repopulation

process can be conducted

with real-time intelligence,

benefitting all parties involved

Using business intelligence concepts, the entire evacuation process can be much more effectively managed

photo by jpeepz