VEMIS Background Information

INTRODUCTION

Disasters pose many obstacles for integrating and coordinating emergency operations, especially when essential emergency management staff are prevented from reaching designated emergency operations centres. In seismically active regions such as southern British Columbia, these problems are especially significant from a communication perspective. For several decades the region has experienced rapid population growth with little concern for ensuring adequate protection from earthquakes. This is due in part to the facts that, despite experiencing some 200 earthquakes annually, few are of intensity to be felt and almost a half century has passed since the last damaging seismic event. Further to this, residents have been very fortunate to have experienced few major natural or technologically-based disasters requiring multi-agency and multi-jurisdictional response capabilities. Consequently, most emergency response arrangements (including communication arrangements) have been designed to support locally-based events which might escalate to invoking mutual aid arrangements with adjacent communities. Few arrangements are in place and tested for major events requiring full-scale regional, provincial and federal support and coordination.

In 1994, a Canadian national emergency exercise (CANATEX-2) was conducted to test the interface between local, provincial and federal emergency management arrangements in the wake of a catastrophic earthquake in Southwestern British Columbia. The exercise revealed a number of tactical and logistical problems which would affect emergency response in a real event of this magnitude. From a physical perspective, it is anticipated that significant damage would be sustained by basic infrastructure such as transportation networks, utilities and buildings (including some emergency operations centres). From a communication perspective, it is anticipated that telephone (including cellular) service would be severely degraded because of network congestion and physical damage. Two-way radio communication services would also be impacted by physical damage, loss of power and congestion. Equally problematic is the lack of technical compatibility among agency radio systems which operate on unique radio frequencies and share few common frequencies to support inter-agency coordination.

These problems would likely result in emergency managers being unable to reach designated emergency operations centres for considerable periods of time and in the meantime being kept out the information flows and hence decision-making structures in which they play critical roles.

ROLE OF NEW COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

New developments in wireless and fixed information networking open significant opportunities for addressing some of these EOC participation problems, especially in helping to integrate and provide alternative means of access to emergency management information systems. The application of digital communication techniques and the adoption of common communication protocols are bringing about a revolution in communication networking and electronic information sharing. These developments are also spawning the convergence of previously independent communication media such as radio and television broadcasting, computers and wired and wireless telecommunications systems to forge new forms of addressable and personalized communications services linking private and public organizations all over the world and laying the foundations of new information highways.

Traffic over these networks is translated into packets of data which are controlled electronically rather than physically and flow over 'virtual' networks created and flexibly managed by computer software. The result is that the same information can now be addressed and sent over a variety of communication media, and if properly designed and implemented, sent with a high degree of accuracy and speed. This also means that around the clock access to information services can be provided from fixed or mobile and remote locations and increasingly through a variety of substitutable telecommunications means, including cabled and wireless facilities.

Poorly designed and implemented systems, however, can also increase the vulnerability of societies. Increased reliance on electronic communication and information systems opens opportunities to breakdown and loss of critical information. New opportunities continue to arise for the misuse of computer services through unauthorized access and vandalism. Equally troublesome are the consequences of human error or the physical impact of disasters. Many computer networks suffer from a lack of redundancy and/or diversity in circuit routing. As a consequence, a single point of failure, such as a gateway host feeding into the backbone of a network can easily bring down large segments of a network. To a large extent, many of Canada's regional networks feeding into the Internet still possess these characteristics.

VIRTUAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Notwithstanding these issues, these new facilities are bringing about widespread change to emergency management practices. Few emergency management agencies are not using automated information processing techniques or increasingly becoming reliant upon electronic networking to support both intra and interagency communication requirements. These changes are not entirely due to conscious decisions being made by emergency managers to embrace these technologies for emergency management purposes, but rather, are also influenced by larger societal considerations of local, regional and national level governments who are viewing investments in national information infrastructure (highways) as strategically important to achieving broader social and economic goals.

For the emergency management community , a key consideration is determining how to apply these advanced systems in the struggle to lesson the vulnerability of societies and ecosystems from natural and technologically based hazards. In this regard, the gradual blending of public and private commercial and non-commercial networks and services could prove to be a windfall for the Canadian emergency management community especially if it can affect the design and implementation of networks to ensure robustness, security, interoperability, compatibility and priority access during emergencies. In this new environment, the challenge then is not to determine how to construct proprietary networks specifically designed for emergency managers, but rather to determine how to add value to emerging inter-connectable and addressable networks, similar to the way enhanced 911 and other emergency services are layered over existing telecommunications networks. Such a proposition, however, calls for greater cross-representation among local, provincial, national and international emergency management programs and processes and network and application developers and administrators.

SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY CONTRIBUTIONS

In the past four years, through the Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology and the Telematics Research Lab, Simon Fraser University has been engaged in a number of projects focusing on how the development, interconnection and use of new forms of distributed local and wide-area digital networking can improve interactive decision-making at multiple points in emergency management programs. This work entails collaborating with technology developers, network designers and managers, researchers and emergency planners and managers in the design, testing, evaluation and implementation of new electronic communication and information systems, as well as investigating means to ensure that such systems themselves are not vulnerable to hazard occurrences. Two specific areas of research involve:

1) the design and implementation of the Emergency Preparedness Information Exchange (EPIX), a computer-based emergency management information system operating on the world-wide Internet. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the regular exchange of ideas and information among Canadian and international public and private sector organizations and individuals about the prevention of, preparation for, recovery from and/or mitigation of risk associated with natural and technologically-based hazards.

2) the design and testing of a Virtual Emergency Management Information System (VEMIS). VEMIS is an experimental alternative backbone networking system comprising both cabled and wireless components to provide robust, fault tolerant fixed and mobile communications to integrate organizational management systems before, during and after emergencies.

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