Awareness, alerting apps pay dividends

In Pennsylvania, a quickly deployable situational-awareness solution from White Canvas Group helped bolster the efficiency and effectiveness of Huntingdon County's response to Superstorm Sandy, according to an emergency-management official.

Called GridMeNow, the smartphone-based solution lets users share reports and images — automatically stamped with the time and location — that provide enhanced awareness of a given situation, which can be used to improve damage-assessment and recovery efforts, said Adam Miller, director of the county's Emergency Management Agency.

"We're not as technologically resourced as metropolitan areas, so to gain situational awareness here sometimes is a big challenge," Miller said. "Allowing folks to be able to snap a picture and send that to us — giving us information that is geo-coded — is just terribly useful."

Miller said that he first learned of GridMeNow about a year ago and had planned to deploy the solution in Huntingdon County this fall. However, he decided the county should use the solution on the eve of Superstorm Sandy's landfall.

"Basically, the day before the event came … I said, 'I believe we can use this and implement this right now,'" Miller said. "So, we pulled the trigger on it at the last minute, and I was shocked how simple it was for me to basically spin up users on it and start making reports from the field to us, to start to develop a new level of situational awareness — and, boy, was it a treat."

RELATED: Pennsylvania County deploys White Canvas app as part of Sandy response

Huntingdon County was not damaged by the storm as much as other parts of the northeast, but GridMeNow let emergency officials assess problems quickly and is ideal for creating damage-assessment reports needed for federal aid, Miller said.

"When I want to paint a picture of the type of damage that my community has in developing a statement of impact for the federal government … there is no better way to paint a picture than to have actual imagery," he said. Normally, it takes a long time to acquire such data, but the data acquisition occurs in real time with the GridMeNow system, according to Miller.

When the state of Massachusetts implemented in October an emergency alert system developed by Ping4Alerts, little did officials know that they would be facing one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history just a few weeks later. But even though the system — designed to push public-safety and health alerts to the public via a smartphone application — was used minimally during the crisis, it was comforting to know that it was there, said Peter Judge, the public information officer for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

"Unlike the stuff that you saw happening in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, we really didn't have that level of trouble," Judge said. "Statewide, we only ended up with 165 people in shelters. You wouldn't have believed how we missed this bullet — [the storm] surrounded us. Fortunately, we didn't get whacked like our sister states did."

RELATED: Massachusetts official: We missed the brunt of Sandy, but we were ready

The system was used to push out weather alerts and an Amber Alert as the storm approached the commonwealth, but it really is intended to be used only in life-threatening circumstances, according to Judge. The theory is that using the system often and for more mundane purposes eventually will result in a "boy who cried wolf" scenario.

"When this thing goes off, we want them to know that there's something incredibly serious [happening]," Judge said.

Of course, the solution only will be effective if people download the application. About 10,000 people did so within the first 24 hours after MEMA's press conference to announce the initiative, which was carried by the four major TV networks in the region, as well as a cable news network and a Spanish-language station, in addition to print media. But, with more than 6 million people in the commonwealth, there still is a lot of outreach work to do.

"We're using a grassroots approach on this," Judge said. "There are 351 communities in the commonwealth, and they each have their own emergency management director, who we interact with on a daily basis. We're working with them to promote it within their communities. … There's a lot of enthusiasm, so we expect that these numbers will continue to grow by leaps and bounds."