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CITIZEN
world • fund • tackle • active • government • country • developing • agency • social structure • community • regional • contribution
C1
NODE Reimagining emergency response for resilient cities Natural disasters and other large-scale emergencies are impacting city-dwellers more than ever. 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 U.S. 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 (Graham, Markowitz, Wallace-Wells). 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 radio frequency communication, but without mobile phones, cloud databases, or Internet Protocol-based communication.
Humberto Ceballos, Jenny Fan, and Carla Saad