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Catastrophic Event Evacuation
A Class-5 hurricane is headed for your community and thousands of “special needs” individuals need to be safely evacuated. These individuals have mobility, medical, mental health, transportation, and/or financial issues that prevent them from evacuating themselves. Calls are coming in from numerous addresses scattered throughout a broad-geographic region. Each individual needs to be accounted for on an ad-hoc basis, tracking them from the time they are picked up until they are dropped off at a designated address or Emergency Shelter. Command and control of these operations requires tracking of who is on each evacuation bus and where they are currently located. If the planned Emergency Shelter becomes full while the evacuation bus is in route, the bus driver needs to be redirected to an alternate Emergency Shelter. The bus driver may not be familiar with the pick-up locations, or the location of the Emergency Shelter in another part of the state.
Solution: The call-in addresses of the special-needs residents are exported from special-needs databases and geo-coded for display as a layer over a detailed street level map display on the AVaiL™ Command and Control Center. Evacuation busses equipped with OnComm mobile communications hardware and a standard laptop or tablet PC, and AVaiL Navigator™ software are dispatched to pick-up all special needs individuals within a specified region. AVaiL Navigator™provides on-board navigation information, showing the current bus location on a road map with the location to all special-needs individuals requiring evacuation and the optimal route and turn-by-turn directions to each individual. AVaiL Navigator™also optionally supports an interface to the on-board diagnostics of the bus through AVaiL Diagnostics™. As each person is picked-up they receive an ID card that is clipped to their clothing or wrist, and the ID number is entered into the laptop and data is uploaded through OnComm Rocket™. Anyone leaving the bus is also uploaded through OnComm Rocket™. This provides positive ID of each individual in the evacuation bus at the Command and Control Center. The command and control center knows in near real-time where the bus is; when, where and what time each individual boarded the bus; who is currently riding in the bus; and when, where and what time each individual leaves the bus. If the optional onboard diagnostics interface is connected, operating status data such as fuel level, rpm, speed, and trouble codes from the engine computer can be monitored by the Command and Control Center. This can help avert any unexpected break-downs or dangerous operational conditions. All of the on-board navigation functionality operates disconnected from wireless coverage. Other data is stored until the vehicle re-enters wireless coverage and is then automatically uploaded. |
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