To practice response to this potential scenario, emergency management professionals gathered in San Diego from Aug. 21 to Aug. 26 for Strong Angel III. The event -- the third of its kind -- revisited obstacles encountered by the public and private sectors in the wake of the Gulf Coast hurricanes, tsunamis in Southeast Asia and earthquakes in Pakistan.
Strong Angel isn't a specific military, civilian or humanitarian group, but rather a network of individuals from the public and private emergency management community. An executive committee -- consisting of the event director, as well as members involved in telecommunications, civil and military integration, and volunteer and community coordination, to name a few -- leads the network, and demonstration objectives are based on recent natural and man-made disasters from around the globe.
International Impacts
All three Strong Angel events have demonstrated scenarios with global impacts, and have been led by Navy Cmdr. and Dr. Eric Rasmussen, who is also chairman of the Department of Medicine at Naval Hospital Bremerton, Wash. Rasmussen said that promoting civil-military cooperation in meeting challenges was one of Strong Angel III's goals, as was preparing for an incident in which utilities, such as water, power, phone and Internet would be unavailable, and local governments would be required to provide humanitarian assistance relief -- with no established telecommunications infrastructure.
Shortcomings discovered during Katrina and the tsunami in Thailand were the primary sources for objectives during this Strong Angel demonstration, Rasmussen said, adding that a demonstration and an exercise are two different things.
"An exercise is training to requirements, so I would say, 'You and your unit should be able to do these tasks, so go out and practice,'" he said. "What we do in Strong Angel is a demonstration, where we have an overarching problem, and we have a bunch of objectives in the problem, and we don't know how we're going to meet them. You start talking about the objectives early on -- in our case, seven months before the demonstration -- and you let it percolate through all the smart people you know and all the smart people they know, until someone says, 'I know this guy in Bulgaria who did a fantastic job with this.'"
Since the first Strong Angel, which took place in Hawaii in 2000, the demonstration has grown from a small collaborative military exercise to 800 participants from academia, the public and private sectors, and humanitarian agencies, such as CARE International, the Hexayurt Project and Save the Children. All Strong Angel events intend to chip away at the communication barrier between military and private groups working in an emergency or disaster situation.
"A lot of problems go away once people start talking," said Dave Warner, chief intelligence officer of MindTel, a company specializing in stability operations. "It helps to know what's reasonable and unreasonable to ask of groups."
Strong Angel III had two fundamental operating groups: the "Core" and the "Shadowlites." Both groups worked together with varying degrees of interrelation to simulate a truly complex disaster, according to the Strong Angel III Web site www.strongangel3.net.
The Core includes a limited number of public- and private-sector participants who performed a series of technical and nontechnical experiments to address a predefined set of 49 objectives.
The Shadowlite section, led by Warner, coordinated and supported the Core activities from multiple linked venues in the San Diego region. "The Shadowlites are stand-alone emergent synergy operations that serve to enhance and extend the main site activities so that the Core can 'pull in' relevant applications and emerging advanced technologies," according to the Web site, which also states that the Shadowlites remotely generated much of the content that drove the acquisition, analysis, translation and reporting tools in the Core.
Forming Partnerships
San Diego State University hosted Strong Angel III in cooperation with the San Diego Fire Department. As in the past two demonstrations, civil and military participation was essential. And this time, several vendors also partook in the demonstration, though not to sell or display their products and services.
"When disaster hits, businesses partner," said Robert Kirkpatrick, a member of the Strong Angel III executive committee and a lead architect for a Microsoft Humanitarian Systems team. "Google and Microsoft worked side by side to make technologies integrate seamlessly."
Months before Strong Angel III, he added, the committee was already introducing and partnering businesses with one another.
Kirkpatrick participated in Strong Angel I and II, and his job at Microsoft has taken him around the globe to solve humanitarian collaboration problems, including in the Middle East and in Katrina's aftermath.
Though the Strong Angel events are modeled after recent disasters, the scenarios concentrate on problems that happen in 80 percent of all disasters, Kirkpatrick said, such as military being able to keep information related to the disaster secure.
One hurdle Scott Feinberg, public safety market development manager for Tandberg, a video-conferencing systems provider for several homeland security and fire departments, had to overcome was initiating contact with participants because no clear leader emerged during the demonstration. The unscripted exercise didn't call for any one particular group to take a leadership role.
"The first couple of days, people didn't know what to do with video conferencing," Feinberg said. "The fourth day, I didn't have enough equipment."
Having worked in visual communications for 12 years, Feinberg said it used to be painful to set up video conferencing. "I was really surprised at how fast we were up online with the slightest hint of Internet connectivity," he said. "I mean we were up in seconds."
At Strong Angel, there was more video-conferencing interaction between local government and public safety agencies, rather than with military, Feinberg said. This makes sense because militaries want more control of their secured networks. However, outside of Strong Angel, more federal agencies have been asking how to shift video conferencing from private intranets to public-sector networks in a crisis situation, he added.
One objective during the demonstration was to test how effective ham radio is in disaster situations, Rasmussen said. "So I shut down all communications at the Strong Angel site on the first day, and said, 'Call home. Cell is down. Internet is down. Call home,'" he recalled, adding that for a few hours, no one was sure what to do. "The ham radio guys were right there sitting around talking to Singapore, saying, 'These guys are absolutely lost without their communication.'"
Eventually, Rasmussen said, those taking part in that objective started drifting over to the ham radio group and learned they could send e-mail and communicate while everything else was down.
Groups can have all of the technology in the world, Warner said, but if the people can't communicate, the social network fails.
"The social network is absolutely imperative. What are people's intrinsic instincts?" Warner said. "Are they not talking because they are a jerk or because they didn't know they could ask?"
Particularly with government, Warner said, there is conflict between policy and common sense. In Katrina, policy wouldn't allow the military to do some things the public expected, and Warner anticipates civilians will take a more active role in emergency management in the future.
"From the United States point of view, I think emergency management is going to the people," he said. "Government protocol doesn't take into account public participation. Katrina crushed the notion that government was going to take care of us. This doesn't mean we aren't going to work with public agencies, but it is important for citizens to participate fully in the response."
A 90-page report on findings during the third demonstration is available at the Strong Angel Web site.
