Contingency Planning

When The Wind Blows: Effective Mass Emergency Notification During Hurricane Season

By Simon Berman February 10, 2009

Camille, Andrew, Rita, Isabelle, Katrina. These names represent just a few of the most devastating hurricanes to impact the United States over the last 40 years. Each of these massive weather disasters caused hundreds of millions -- in some cases billions -- of dollars in property damage. All of them were killers. More than 1,800 people died as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

After-action reports on these storms revealed significant problems, and, in some cases, distinct failures in mass notification and alerting. Quite literally, lives could have been saved and property protected if mass notification systems were more timely, accurate and pervasive.

Perhaps the only good news to be found in hurricanes is that, unlike tornadoes, hurricanes form slowly and can be reliably tracked, giving forecasters and emergency response teams time to prepare and get people out of harm’s way.

Despite a level of predictability, these meterological  monsters still have inherent elements of unpredictability in location, strength and impact. Tracking the path of a hurricane is key to deciding which area gets alerted and when. Being able to trigger alerts from hurricane watches to warnings means the right people will get the most accurate warning in time to take the proper action. The ramifications for a failure in this area range from unnecessary traffic jams to needless loss of life.

It’s important to recognize that hurricanes are immense weather systems that can affect large land areas with different phenomena. In one area, flooding from a high storm surge is the danger; in another, it’s high-speed straight-line winds; and yet another, it’s the sudden emergence of tornados. All of these factors conspire to make emergency notifications during a hurricane season a challenge.

For example, alerting a population too soon can create problems with evacuation plans and have significant economic costs due to lost productivity. Alerting the wrong population based on outdated forecast data, say one outside of an impact area, can produce unnecessary inconvenience and panic. And finally, the ultimate failure of any mass emergency notification system is not reaching all those potentially in danger with the alert.

IP-based MNS
Today’s modern emergency notification systems use IP networking to address alerting challenges. These systems transform an organization’s network into a mass notification system in times of emergency. Operators are able to quickly send out alerts to tens of thousands of people via multiple network-connected devices such as computers, mobile devices, phones and sirens. In addition to distributing alerts, they provide confirmation of alert receipt and can connect to existing weather-related information sources such as the National Weather Service’s Emergency Managers Weather Information Network. This allows the alerting systems to receive critical information such as weather warnings, watches and forecasts. It automatically sends alerts to emergency managers who can then qualify the threat and activate an emergency notification to a broader group that may be in harm’s way.

Other sources of weather information can also be integrated with network-centric emergency notification systems, including those from the United States Geological Survey, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Homeland Security, creating a comprehensive alerting system able to handle a wide range of emergency scenarios effectively.

Many U.S. organizations, from the military to the American Red Cross, use network-based emergency alerting technologies to rapidly disseminate alerts to large populations, using desktop pop-up messages to computers; calls to landline and mobile phones; alerts to mobile devices; and even using existing siren and public address systems.

Leading solutions in network-centric emergency notification send alert recipients information regarding the proper action to take -- not just information about the impending situation. So, in addition to sending the situation alert, the capability exists for communicating critical instructions to the population about a storm’s status, changes to evacuation routes or the emergence of new threats, such as tornados or flooding.

All of these capabilities add up to the increased likelihood that the potential impact of massive disaster, such as hurricane, can be mitigated. That means lives saved and property spared.

Hurricane prediction, indeed any dangerous weather event, depends on luck and, ultimately, probability. Being able to counter such uncertainty with a comprehensive, reliable and effective emergency mass notification system can be one bit of sunshine in what otherwise would be a gloomy forecast.

About the author

Simon Berman
Simon Berman is vice president of product marketing for AtHoc Inc., San Mateo, Calif.