Appendix - Locator Service

Problem: Evacuation plans for commercial buildings have specified rally points for the occupants so that to make it easier to determine if anyone was left inside. A similar mechanism would be very useful during disaster response. It would enable rescuers to prioritize their efforts on locations where there are most likely to be victims, by first using the known survivors (for elimination) and then the unaccounted-for.

Problem: Families that are separated spend a great deal of effort to re-unite, often taking serious risks and clogging roads needed for emergency vehicles. This movement can be reduced and delayed if people can reliably get "I'm all right" messages to each other.

Example: Katrina: The locator service was started much too late, and by then many people had been evacuated long distances and didn't get entered into the database until days, weeks or even months later.

Example: Agnes flood (1972): In an area with roughly half the population of Palo Alto (Corning NY), the local radio station spent a significant portion (one-third?) of its broadcast on announcements of where people were and on who was being sought. After a week, this started to taper off.

Problem: The advice for individual families to have an out-of-area contact to check in with does not help non-family members attempting to determine whether there is a need to search/rescue members of that family.

Suggestion: Survey forms for emergency preparation should ask for the out-of-area telephone contact number for the family, providing another source of information about survivors/victims. This may also have the side-effect of encouraging people to establish such a number.

Requirements:

• System that allows virtually immediate roll-out after disaster strikes.
  "System" does not mean that it has to be the same implementation throughout, but rather data gathered in the early phases of the disaster should transition into subsequent versions of the system. For example, during the initial phase, information may be collected on paper forms that will be entered later into a computerized database. You don't want to have this original information rejected/discarded because of issues such as lacking appropriate authentication.
• Component info
  • Status: survived, injured, missing,...
  • Current location/contact info
• Reliability/authentication info for each entry
  • Date of entry
  • Source of information
  • Reliability of information: much of the useful information cannot be absolutely confirmed, but you don't want to have to pretend otherwise.
    Examples of problems:
    • The Jones report that they believe that their neighbors, the Smiths, survived because they saw the Smith's car in the driveway just before the quake and later they saw it was gone (inferring that the Smith had gone elsewhere)