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GCN Home > 11/21/07 web stories

IT touted at TIDES tour

Pentagon highlights IT for disaster response

By Wilson P. Dizard III

The Pentagon showcased a range of technologies today used to manage the consequences of natural disasters and other events that displace people, in an exhibition titled Transportable Infrastructures for Development and Emergency Support (TIDES).

Project advocate Linton Wells, a distinguished research fellow at National Defense University, said the TIDES coalition is now using geospatial technology to analyze and help ameliorate the consequences of the recent cyclone catastrophe in Bangladesh.

“We are trying to get current imagery of Bangladesh to predict where cholera will break out,” Wells said.

The TIDES project covers many technologies that have been developed to help manage the consequences of natural and man-made disasters. The technologies cover the provision of refugee and human support in the areas of shelter, food, water, power, sanitation and other necessities of life, Wells said.

Information technology is an essential support for several aspects of refugees’ survival needs, according to technology experts who displayed various systems at a demonstration site set up at the Pentagon. Technology serves as an enabler of all the other services refugees need, participants said.

Army Col. Paul Bartone, a senior research fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy, cited the importance of telecommunications to the well-being of displaced people. Refugees’ ability to contact or find relatives can help ease the stress they experience, said Bartone, who holds a doctorate in psychology.

He made his remarks in front of a display of telecom equipment from SeaMobile Enterprises of Miramar, Fla. The company’s exhibit featured a satellite earth station and associated switching equipment to provide connectivity that could support as many as 50 groups of people, each roughly the size of an Army company.

Wells emphasized that TIDES is a voluntary alliance of corporations, nonprofit organizations, civilian agencies and military units that provide refugee services. It does not have a corporate vehicle, he said, and it lacks a global network. Such a network might give disaster relief organizations and agencies a means of communicating and a reservoir of data about the assets available in any given region that would facilitate disaster response, he said.

Wells said some TIDES participants have discussed such a network, but no plan is under way to develop it.

More news on related topics: Defense IT, Geospatial, Homeland Security



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