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Thursday, May 17, 2012
Department: August 2007
Risky Business
Will local tech come through when a regional disaster pops?
Story by Jack Crawford Jr. and Jacob Jorgensen
Historians tell us that gambling on the Sacramento River ended in the 1930s when the Delta King made its last prohibition-era cruise to San Francisco; the Army Corps of Engineers reports that Sacramento continues to gamble on its rivers everyday. Though many people mistakenly believe a 100-year event won’t happen for 100 years, no major U.S. city is more at risk of a catastrophic flood than Sacramento.
But the region is also home to a slew of technology resources that could be called into play before and during such a disaster. With these resources, Sacramento has the potential to play a leading role in preparing for and mitigating disaster in our region and elsewhere.
Katrina exposed the many problems with the emergency-response infrastructure. Emergency responders had difficulty exchanging voice and data communications because of the use of different radio bands by different response agencies. Some agencies use incompatible proprietary systems and have different infrastructures. And mobile devices sometimes rely on ground-based relay systems, access to the Internet and other services.
Some agencies assumed that the public power grid, if off-line as a result of the disaster, would be back in a matter of hours — but after several hours, their mobile devices ran out of power. They found they could not acquire adequate numbers of generators for recharging their devices, and on top of that, they discovered they couldn’t get fuel to those generators once they ran out of gasoline.
Establishing voice and data communications at a disaster site is one of the first infrastructure requirements needed to support the activities of emergency workers. While cell phones and walkie-talkies can serve the needs of individual workers, mobile ad hoc command centers require centralized voice and data capabilities.
At present, emergency services agencies must cobble together disparate devices, networks and services in order to create such a capability. But a Folsom-based technology company, JobSight Solutions, has developed a mobile communications device that provides multi-line voice and data services with connectivity to a combination of cell networks and, in the future, to satellite networks, WiMax networks and others.
With its Internet-connectivity capabilities, fully encrypted and secured data communications can be established from a remote disaster site and moved as necessary. Although originally developed for temporary construction job sites, the JobSight product can also solve problems for emergency services and first responder organizations.
The large size of the Katrina disaster area made identifying and communicating specific geographic locations a problem. With such large-scale devastation, familiar landmarks where often obscured, and emergency workers from other areas were unfamiliar with specific landmarks.
While the use of GPS locators allowed emergency workers to identify a location and communicate that location to other workers, GPS devices, mobile communications devices and wireless and broadband communications networks require emergency backup power in order to operate. Many times, diesel generators run out of fuel or don’t work, and mobile devices with rechargeable batteries stop working when no electrical power can be found. Luckily, alternative fuel sources such as fuel cells can make these communications — and other devices — more robust in the face of large-scale disasters.
One of several fuel cell technology companies in the Sacramento area, Jadoo Power, provides hydrogen-based fuel cells optimized for use with mobile communications devices. In a common application, these fuel cell devices are utilized by emergency services organizations to provide mobile recharging capabilities for handheld devices such as walkie-talkies, cell phones and video cameras.
With terrorist-inflicted disaster, additional emergency service requirements complicate the disaster-preparedness planning efforts of government agencies and communities. In addition to robust voice and data communications that are resistant to power loss and infrastructure damage, there is the need for encryption, security and authentication of all communications. A terrorist organization could thwart effective emergency response by monitoring, and even interfering with, emergency responder communications.
The use of a new version of the data communications protocol TCP/IP used by the Internet called IPv6 would provide a dramatic increase in the level of security for data and voice communications that transit the Internet. Several organizations based in Sacramento are leaders in the rollout and adoption of this new protocol. In a recent mandate by the Office of Management and Budget, all federal agencies must convert to IPv6 by June 2008.
A local organization, MetroNet6 Sacramento, is helping to develop a wireless implementation of IPv6 for use by the U.S. Office of Homeland Security and other first responder and emergency services organizations. Using IPv6, MetroNet6 will support both wireless and broadband technology and allow equipped devices to communicate via voice and data in a secure fashion with an ad hoc command center.
Volunteers are building a prototype of MetroNet6 in the Sacramento region with the goal of creating a global network that links emergency service crews. At least one Sacramento-area emergency services district is looking at whether to adopt the wireless and landline network that would serve as a critical communication tool after a disaster.
Instead of using two-way radios and walkie-talkies, police, firefighters and other emergency workers could use devices connected to the Internet to talk across departments and agencies and send voice, photos, video, text, charts and other data that could help when a disaster strikes.
“The blueprints have been drawn that will serve the whole world,” says Geof Lambert, chairman of the California IPv6 Task Force and vice chairman of the North American IPv6 Task Force, which is sponsoring the project.
Sacramento can still be accused of gambling on its rivers, but with these technology advances, we are doing something to dramatically change the odds of winning.
Jack Crawford Jr. (jack@velocityvc.com) and Jacob Jorgensen (jacob@velocityvc.com) are general partners at Velocity Venture Capital, the seed-stage and early-stage venture fund exclusively focused on the Sacramento region.
