Golden Shadow Demonstration

What if, when an emergency occurred, you could send in a text message to your regional fire department with the conditions in your neighborhood?  And what if that text message was then displayed on a map at the fire department so they could see the unfolding conditions in each neighborhood and respond accordingly?   Those are two of the technologies we tested in a San Francisco Bay Area community last November during a public health emergency simulation called Golden Shadow.

Golden Shadow was InSTEDD’s first field test of technologies and procedures selected to overcome some of the shortcomings of our current public health and disaster response systems. We also wanted to develop a local test bed for tools we would be using internationally, including in our Mekong Collaboration Program.

For our first technology tests, we chose our own backyard, home to the world-class California Urban Search and Rescue Task Force 3. This team of firefighters has deployed to Katrina, 9/11, and many other national disasters. USAR 3 is part of the Menlo Park Fire District and housed a few miles from our office.

The challenge:   This project arose out of issues Menlo Fire and USAR have repeatedly experienced in their work: the often considerable gap between what is happening in the field and what headquarters knows. Emergencies like Katrina taught us tragic lessons about what happens when community members are left isolated and alone and disconnected from first responders who could help them. In addition to the first responder needs, this project arose out of a new, emerging threat for which we are not well-prepared:  large scale public health emergencies. 

Figure: Community Volunteers Gathering Public Health Information on their Cell Phones 

The questions: InSTEDD’s job was to answer two important questions: How can technology accelerate the flow of information back and forth between community members to first responders? How can field information be visualized at headquarters so that the Inident Commander can use it and doesn’t have to operate ‘blind’? 

The options: To address these challenges, InSTEDD modified existing technologies and developed new open source software. With this technology and their own hardware (cell phones, laptops), community volunteers could gather information on the status of their neighborhood and transmit that information in real time in field forms, text messages and blogs, so the first responders had a more complete and useful picture of the unfolding crisis.

This field information was then portrayed in images on Google Earth at the Emergency Communications Center ("ECC"), the headquarters for first responders. For the first time, firefighters and public health officials could see the crisis in real time as it unfolded in the field. 

Figure: Incident Command Team Brainstorming at the Emergency Communications Center

The scenario: The Golden Shadow technology package was tested in November 2007 during a four-hour response to a simulated terrorist attack of pneumonic plague at a rock concert in San Jose. In this simulation, the weapon was biological. Golden Shadow was named for the statewide exercise that gave rise to the scenario, Golden Guardian. But unlike Golden Guardian, we focused on experimentation instead of testing to meet state objectives.

Community volunteers used text messages to report short and urgent field conditions, such as the outbreak of a riot (simulated), the discovery of a dead body in the levee or an antibiotic shortage.  Anyone with access to the central repository on Google Earth could reply to the messages by clicking on the icon and then replying inside the pop-up balloon.  The text messages ‘aged’ over time and would fade in color so first responders could identify which text messages were priority.  Text messages from the same phone would show a line between each location of the message so field personnel could be tracked. More detail on this tool is on our technology page.

Figure: Community Volunteers Reporting Field Conditions Using PDAs and Cell Phones

Figure: Epidemiological Curve Generated in Real Time from Community Volunteer Field Surveillance Form Data

In terms of field support, the technology tools were intended as a means to relay much more and better data to the ECC than it would normally receive. The tools we used (sms text messaging, surveillance forms and blogs) proved to be superb in the volume of information they could convey and the immediacy of information. These technologies made it possible for community teams to gather a lot of information very quickly, and may have helped the field teams coalesce because every person was needed. Nonetheless, there were times they did not work well and everyone turned to the HAM radio system when other tools either did not work properly or failed to get a response.

Golden Shadow proved to be as much a social experiment as a technological experiment. This demonstration was the first time field-based community volunteers were integrated with the Incident Command System in a scenario. This demonstration was also the first time in Menlo Park that the public health department worked with the fire department on a public health emergency. These teams were just figuring out how to work together and understand each other’s language, much less use new technologies. These social innovations (and cross-jurisdictional innovations) made evaluation of the technology more difficult to isolate from the social context.

Figure:  Community Volunteer Smiling After a Long Day