Good Read For Planners — GPS or No GPS

… Richard Barnes, the chairman of the London assembly’s July 7 review committee, said it was “unacceptable” that the emergency services were unable to communicate by radio when underground.

The committee found the most striking failure was the lack of planning to care for traumatised survivors of the bombings.

The 151-page report said the “overarching, fundamental lesson” to be learnt from the response to the July 7 attacks was “a lack of consideration of the individuals caught up in major or catastrophic incident”… Read it All Here:

OK, no eye candy today. I’m pointing you to a report on London’s emergency response after last years 7/7 transport bombings that, if I had the power to, I’d force every state, county and municipal emergency planner to read. With just a little editing the report could as easily describe our response to Katrina last year or to the World Trade Center 9/11 catastrophe,

This isn’t GPS-related directly, but since GPS is becoming so prominent in emergency response scenarios it deserves reading.

Among other reasons it should be read is the fact that if you design plans the way most of these current plans are designed, GPS won’t help much. Neither will any other technology. We still are saddled with an emergency response outlook that focuses inward upon the organizations who set themselves up as the elitists responders and the “great unwashed” general public who is … as is forgotten in nearly every plan … the folks for whom the plan is being written

How does you city and county plan provide for (as just one example, that should be obvious), calling local hospitals to tell them of expected disaster survivor “in-bounds’? Notice that even with a disaster in the heart of one of the world’s largest and most advanced cities, the primary hospital who received victims found out after the fact. As shameful as sending responders out day after day to handle emergencies in the underground rail system and when IT happens, then finding out their radios wouldn’t work underground. Hello! You work underground every day! They were perhaps expecting Motorola; (or the other money-hungry vendors) who sell hundred-dollar radios for thousands to agencies who can afford it because they are tax supported, to tell you? Sad and eye opening. It’s worth a read.

By the way, wonder who has been checking up on FEMA’s hurricane plan updates? They have probably been classified to protect the guilty. One of my clients still, after the start of this year’s hurricane season, still not heard back from FEMA on free GPS tracking equipment that was offered up a year ago when Katrina hit. All in good time, I suppose.