The day after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake shook Port-au-Prince, Haiti, killing as many as 270,000 and displacing 1.7 million, SOUTHCOM stood up the All Partners Access Network (APAN) to help coordinate disaster relief efforts of more than 300 government and nongovernmental organizations.
Using blogs, wikis, online chat, forums, calendars and file-sharing capabilities, APAN and information from other tools — such as the open source Sahana disaster management system — connected people in need with those who could provide assistance.
For example, a hospital located outside the area impacted by the earthquake was available to receive patients. Five days after the earthquake, only six patients had checked into the hospital that was unaffected by the disaster. That information was posted to the forum and within two days the hospital was full.
In another case, a text message sent over the Ushahidi crowdsourcing network made it to APAN. Within a half hour of that text message being posted to the forum, a rescue effort was started.
Within about two weeks, 2,000 users exchanged information on a network specifically created for the Haiti earthquake. “The knowledge managers actually became the content owners, and they’re the ones who cleared people in and out of the actual APAN — in this case the community for the [humanitarian assistance disaster response] event,” said Jerry Giles, chief of information services management at the U.S. Pacific Command.
According to Giles, the network increased information sharing between military responders and nongovernmental organizations, which were previously reluctant to share information. “They were getting a lot more information than they would have if it was purely an empirical, 'Fill out this form and send it in, and we’ll go and save somebody,’” he said.
Obstacles to APAN’s implementation in Haiti included limitations on bandwidth and responders’ awareness of the network’s existence, said Ricardo Arias, experimentation program manager for science, technology and experimentation at SOUTHCOM’s J7 directorate.
To overcome the bandwidth limitation, the development team created a lighter-weight mobile application.
Stateside Implementation
Arias thinks there’s potential for using APAN to coordinate disaster response in the U.S., such as with the ongoing response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “I just sent an e-mail today to my counterpart at NORTHCOM asking if they have any plans and really kind of suggesting that they use it to collaborate on the oil spill,” he said on June 24.
So far APAN hasn’t been used to coordinate disaster response in the United States because of differences in procedures at SOUTHCOM and NORTHCOM, which provides emergency assistance to states under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s direction.
However, several emergency management and homeland security officials are registered on the network. Calls for comment for this story were not returned.
In July 2009, APAN was part of the Interagency Shared Situational Awareness Limited Objective Experiment that was conducted by the military’s Joint Forces Command in Virginia to examine how information could be shared between state, local, federal and nongovernmental disaster responders as well as the military.
Officials with the Homeland Security Information Network and others had concerns about sharing a single sign-on because they couldn’t control who got access to the information. “There were folks who were there and wanted to play but when they went back and checked their policy they were like, ‘Eh, we can’t play,’” Giles said.
Also, APAN operates outside the Incident Command System, so relief organizations could get updates from it, but then the response would have to be coordinated through the organizations’ command channels. “What we found out is that a lot of the information that is unstructured needs to get pushed over into the structured side,” he said.
August Vernon, an assistance coordinator and operations officer with Forsythe County, N.C., Office of Emergency Management, sees APAN potentially assisting in responses as long as the Incident Command System is followed. “No matter what, you still need to have the Incident Command System in place,” he said. “Whether it’s for Haiti, it’s for the oil spill or just the smaller events that happen, you’ve got to have the Incident Command System in place and there needs to be some type of command and control and leadership for a lot of different reasons.”
[Photo courtesy of Microsoft.]
