DMT – an integrated disaster management tool

Abstract

Supporting the humanitarian community in crisis situations worldwide is becoming increasingly important as the frequency end extent of crises are growing. The effectiveness of humanitarian aid and rescue missions is dependent on timely and reliable information. After a disaster has happened time is critical. Intervention within the first 48 hours is crucial to save lives. At the same time it is often difficult to understand how best to send in rescue teams, since in most sudden onset natural disaster the overall situation is complex. In major disasters the requirement for coordination does not cease after the first 48 hours. Instead, many large scale international humanitarian support missions just start after this period. In all cases, information on the location of the event, the amount of damage/casualties and the transport infrastructure still available are critical to send in help. The operational support of humanitarian relief efforts during crisis situations with rapid mapping and communications and navigation is becoming more and more important. Communication between relief forces in the field is essential for coordination as is dissemination of aggregated situation information into the field. Recent work has demonstrated the use of web mapping and satellite based communication services as useful tools. This is reflected in initiatives and projects like the International Charter ‘Space and Major Disasters’ or the GSE RESPOND. Nevertheless, there is still a need for an improvement of the products provided so far and an extension of services. Today most relief organizations employ one or more of the existing satellite communication networks, mostly for voice communications between local and central headquarters. Receivers for GPS (and Galileo in future) are widespread and provide personal navigation in an often unfamiliar environment. Earth observation satellites provide overhead imagery to show type of damage and precise damage location, mostly used in headquarters for assistance with strategic decisions. However, the potential of combining the individual systems to an integrated infrastructure is only utilized to a minimal extent. However, if done optimally it can provide many benefits such as a more accurate damage assessment and the selecting the transport infrastructure that should be used by the rescue teams. A major field for improvements is the extension of the information flow to and from the individual members of a relief team. Our work addresses the existing lack of rapidly deployable infrastructures in order to support the efforts of the relief teams in disaster management. We have been working on such rapidly deployable infrastructures within recent and ongoing projects. Our work builds on both existing and innovative solutions and services to assist the post disaster stages of the crisis life cycle. In this paper we are presenting a disaster management tool “DMT” that is being developed in the framework of the LIMES project and has the following objectives: • Advance the coordination and data sharing of crisis relevant information within the European and international context to minimize time losses between data acquisition and information extraction • Development and integration of dedicated telecommunication tools in crisis management for robust bi-directional exchange of information between headquarters and field teams, including transfer of vector/raster information for situation assessment as well as robust communications and information exchange between teams in the field • A system that is fully accepted by professional disaster management teams for its usability and usefulness. Accordingly, end users have been closely involved starting from the initial concept and are consulted for feedback during the entire implementation. Analysis of rescue operations and interviews with rescue workers were done to derive a comprehensive list of mandatory requirements that have to be met by our system, in order to become operational. As an example of striving to meet such requirements, the system is designed for “zero-configuration” upon setting up when arriving at an incident. In this paper, background information about the need of DMT, purpose and functionality, system design and implementation aspects (software and hardware) will be explained in details. Additionally, details on the communications and navigation tools, the smart rapid mapping concept and the different hardware flavors will be illustrated. Field experiences and user feedback from our demonstrations of the DMT in the Assessment Mission Course (AMC) in Cyprus in 2008 and 2009 will be shown. Finally, an outlook of the future work towards extending the system’s capabilities will be given.