The Problem

Natural disasters and other large-scale emergencies are impacting city-dwellers more than ever. When these situations arise, official 911 emergency operation centers (EOCs) play a critical role in communicating and coordinating relief efforts and medical assistance. Despite this, EOCs rely on aging infrastructure built in the 1960s, a world with landlines, printed manuals, and radiofrequency communication, but no mobile phones, cloud databases, or Internet Protocol-based communication.

From Hurricane Harvey to Irma to Maria, cities are not equipped to deal with the scale of disaster response required by recent 21st-century storms. When official services like local police and FEMA (the US Federal Emergency Management Agency) are overwhelmed, civilians rely on neighbors and spontaneously organized groups like the Cajun Navy, which consists entirely of volunteer dispatchers and boat rescuers. But, the paradox of emergent groups is they cannot scale from the bottom-up without eventually compromising in effectiveness or safety, while official top-down services have difficulties reaching the victims on the ground efficiently.