Automation Software, GPS Speed Disaster Relief

The Eagles Wings Foundation is a nonprofit Florida-based public foundation created in 1999 by Scott Lewis to aid disaster victims in the United States and the Caribbean. The foundation relies on donations and volunteers to be able to go door to door after major disasters such as fires, hurricanes, and tornados, to determine the amount of damage and what help can be provided to the victims.

In 2005, more than 1,500 volunteers from The Eagles Wings Foundation teamed up to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina. The volunteers visited more than 100,000 survivors in 14 days. Areas were mapped out for each volunteer to cover, and they were armed with Garmin GPS units to help them stay within their designated areas. The volunteers went door to door with notepads and pens to inquire if there were any urgent needs and to deliver food and water. If a household had someone with an urgent medical need (such as someone with emphysema who was out of oxygen or a diabetic whose insulin hadn't been refrigerated because of electricity loss), the volunteer would write that information down so that a medical crew could follow up. Households without any urgent needs were not recorded at all.

Although this process was helpful to the victims needing attention, there were areas in which it could be improved. For instance, if there was a way to track each household visit, the information could be handed on to the local government so it could track each survivor and what each household needed. This way, the appropriate resources, even if they weren't urgent, could be deployed to each household. In addition, the contact information from each visit could be listed on a website that victims' families could log onto to make sure their loved ones had survived.

"I knew these improvements to the door-to-door process would not be possible as long as the volunteers were using paper and pen, because they simply didn't have time to write all of this information down with the number of visits they made each day," says Lewis. He had the idea of deploying software that would automate the information-gathering process on a cell phone the volunteers could easily carry so that The Eagles Wings Foundation could have a record of each person the volunteers contacted and what their needs were.

"After researching various field service software solutions, I chose to partner with Agilis Systems because I felt their commercial field service application would be a good starting point for the project," says Lewis. The two entities worked together for eight months to create Pathfinder, disaster relief automation software. Lewis also had to find a phone for the solution that could withstand the often-rugged conditions of a disaster environment. "Many people ask me why I didn't choose a PDA, and the answer is that PDAs are too fragile for a disaster environment and are too expensive," says Lewis. "Rugged mobile computers were simply out of our price range, and they aren't simple enough to train large numbers of volunteers in a short time period." Lewis chose the Sanyo 700 flip phone, which is a milspec (military specification) phone. During emergency response, volunteers oftentimes operate in areas where there is no cellular service. Therefore, the information volunteers gather using the Pathfinder software can be stored in the Sanyo phone and transferred to a laptop computer via Bluetooth at the end of operational periods. The Sanyo phones can store information from approximately 700 household visits before requiring data transfer.

The Pathfinder software was loaded onto the Sanyo phones by The Eagles Wings Foundation's IT staff. Lewis held three full-scale field-training sessions for volunteers to test the solution. During a training session with 220 volunteers, Lewis found that each volunteer could obtain information from 80 to 90 survivors per day, compared with the previous paper method, in which they could only obtain information from five to seven per day. The volunteers for the training sessions ranged in age from 13 to 85, and on average it took about 60 minutes to train each person.

Automated Information Gathering Enables Fast Response
Pathfinder prompts each volunteer through a series of checklists when they visit a home to determine the welfare of the survivors and what resources they need. The volunteer enters information using drop-down boxes on approximately 20 questions that target household and special needs, and the information is geocoded and time-stamped using the GPS data so a follow-up crew can be sent immediately to address the specified needs. In addition to automated checklists, specific information can be entered in comment spaces in the same way you'd type a text message. For instance, when a volunteer arrives at a house and a survivor is safe and well, there is a box with this option for them to check. When this box is checked, the volunteer enters the name, address, and phone number of the survivor. A drop-down box appears for the volunteer to check for legal consent from the survivor to post their name on the website listing survivors. In addition to the safe and well category, there are automated checklists for survivors that are at rescue centers and loading onto evacuation buses. Once the volunteer has entered the appropriate information for a household, they press a 'submit and save' box before moving on to the next.

The first opportunity The Eagles Wings Foundation had to use the solution outside of training was Hurricane Ike. More than 400 volunteers from the organization were based in Orange County, TX from September 15 to September 21. In this time, the volunteers visited more than 6,000 homes. From these visits, more than 250 follow-up needs were identified and reported to the appropriate resources. Eighteen volunteers also completed 4,400 rapid damage assessments in one day using a one-click drop-down box that rates the level of damage on a numeric scale. Rapid damage assessments rate the level of damage a home has incurred to help identify the amount of relief funds to be allocated to that household. When volunteers completed damage assessments with pen and paper, they were only able to complete 500 to 700 per day. Lewis has put Pathfinder on the market for other organizations to deploy, and it is currently available through Sprint and Disaster Solutions.