Be prepared

The Lincoln Public Schools has launched a new application to provide its staff and emergency responders with updated situational awareness information about each of its schools and facilities.  The system, developed with assistance from a U.S. Department of Education Readiness & Emergency Management for Schools (REMS) grant, was developed by a contractor, SafePlans.  I attended a kickoff training session yesterday, along with other staff from LPD and LF&R

The system is called Emergency Response Information (ERIP), and provides data such as area maps, aerial photographs, floor plans, exit locations, utility shutoffs, hazardous materials locations, and digital imagery of the interior and exterior of each site.  This is all good information, and it is nicely packaged.  The site is designed for simple navigation, and does not require any uncommon plug-ins or helper applications.  It runs fine in IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Safari's iPad edition, and the webkit browser on my Android tablet.  Like many such systems these days, it is a secure web application.  Here's the problem with web applications for emergency preparedness: in an emergency, there is a fair possibility the Internet will be unavailable:  power may be out, data centers offline, backhaul cut, wireless services overwhelmed.  

We have experienced all of these to varying degrees with three comparatively minor crises during my tenure as police chief: We had a fiber optic line cut between the County City Building and the Law Enforcement Center that effeectively severed computer communications with police headquarters and the 911 Center.  We experienced a water main break at the County City Building that took out the entire building for four months.  We had a huge early season snow storm that took out power to over 100,000 citizens for up to a week, and crippled both landline and cellular telephone.  These are nothing of the scale of an F4 tornado, a Category 4 hurricane, or a major earthquake.

If your eggs are all in the basket of an Internet/Intranet solution for preparedness, you may not be prepared.  That's why I was very pleased to see that ERIP also provided a low-tech "offline" variant.  If the cool web version is inaccessible, you've got the backup on a memory stick and still provides critical information with nothing more than a working laptop and a generator for an occasional recharge.  Keep it fairly current with an update at least every year and you will have a good sturdy belt in the event your suspenders fail.