Fergie's Tech Blog

The Red Cross: Unfamiliar Tasks For an Organization Used to Disaster

Ellen McCarthy writes in The Washington Post:

The government is calling on the American Red Cross to take on a technological challenge the dimensions of which it has never before confronted.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency told the organization famous for blood drives and providing blankets to set up Internet kiosks in nearly 200 shelters scattered across the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast, many of them still without power. It must put in a phone system so that people displaced by the storm can report that they're alive. And it is expected to create a digital mortuary to gather the names of the dead.

Along with volunteers to organize soup kitchens, the Red Cross is dispatching engineers to set up wireless networks and trucks outfitted with satellite equipment that will allow isolated shelters to communicate with the rest of the world.

The challenge in the devastated region is like that faced by an army creating a communications system in a war zone. For the Red Cross, it is a new role, and one for which it is not wholly prepared.

posted by Fergie @ 9/04/2005 11:21:00 AM