New Tool Helps Emergency Responders

As evidenced by the recent case of the January 12 Haiti earthquake, natural disasters can leave behind a trail of devastation so severe, that experts need to spend a lot of time just figuring out the extent of the devastation. To specifically address this issue, researchers at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) have partnered with investigators of the Virtual Alabama program, in creating a program known as “Virtual USA” (vUSA).

Basically, what the new system will do is provide emergency responders, and authorities coordinating search&rescue efforts, with a way of accurately assessing the extent of the damages produced by a natural disaster. It will be able to superimpose satellite images collected after a disaster on top of images showing the normal layout of a particular city or area. By analyzing the differences between the two sets of images, the teams on the ground will be able to figure out where most of the devastation occurred, and intervene in that area specifically, where their work would have the most impact.

But one of the challenges facing experts trying to set up the new system is the lack of inter-operable data. That is to say, most states in the US have data sets, but they are controlled from a federal level, which makes it incredibly difficult for these pieces of information to be pooled together. Researchers at the DHS want to create a new, bottom-up approach, in which the state collecting the data becomes the owner of those data. Then, a number of meetings will bring together all data owners, and protocols for sharing will be set in place. When viewed through this perspective, setting up the vUSA software is actually the easy part. The difficulty is getting people to talk to each other.

“Just to socialize the concept of data-sharing – to get everyone communicating, to localize solutions – takes six months. Too many federal and state programs fall short of their potential because they're driven from the top-down without buy-in at the local level,” the S&T Command, Control, and Interoperability Division (CCI) Director, Dr. David Boyd, explains. The expert has been directly involved in creating the framework necessary for bringing vUSA into reality, but he says that a lot of work still remains to be done.