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Nancy Cox and Nigel Ballard
Overview: Working to Reconnect People
When natural disaster strikes, the scope
of damage can be overwhelming. For
Intel, the scope of the damage from
Hurricane Katrina was shocking, and it
prompted an immediate response. Managers
quickly formed teams to organize the
thousands of employees who called in to
help, and coordinated a wave of
donations of equipment and skilled
volunteers. The company provided
organization and deployment of
everything from money to skilled workers
to an experimental wireless
network—cutting edge technology that
dramatically improved relief efforts in
a rugged environment where the
infrastructure had completely collapsed.
Although Intel is a large corporation
(90,000+ employees), it is extremely
flexible, well organized, and able to
respond quickly to unusual situations,
such as Hurricane Katrina. The
corporation also has a strong,
sustaining, top-down and bottom-up
culture of
community service. Executives act as
role models for community service,
creating business processes that
encourage employees to donate their
time, skills and money. Employees and
executives alike are heavily involved in
their communities. In the wake of
Katrina, those business ideals,
processes, and actions provided critical
help to relief organizations and
evacuees throughout the stricken region.
Leading
with Expertise
As Intel and the rest of the world were
realizing the extent of the damage,
managers with personal experience in
disaster-related areas quickly stepped
forward. For example, Nancy Cox, Intel's
Greater Americas Region IT Manager, was
asked to lead the coordination team for
the hurricane relief effort. She had
gained emergency management experience
several years ago when her manager and
another Intel executive were murdered by
Hutu rebels in Africa.
Nigel Ballard, who manages Intel
initiatives for low-income, underserved
or immigrant populations, had extensive
prior experience with civil and military
wireless equipment. While the shock of
the hurricane damage was still
reverberating through the country, he
was immediately asked to join the tiger
team Intel had assembled to manage
aspects of wireless technologies and
deployments in the stricken area.
Said Cox, "We had a team of unique
people with very different strengths,
who came together in this crisis in a
perfect mix of yin and yang. It was a
unique experience in business and, in
the face of one of the worst natural
disasters the U.S. has ever seen, has
been one of the most satisfying
coordination jobs of my life."
A Flood of
Volunteers
One of the first things the coordination
team had to do was manage the
volunteers. With thousands of Intel
employees calling in to ask how they
could help, keeping track of offers was
a massive effort in itself. An entirely
separate team was assigned just to take
over that task. That team quickly set up
a database to organize volunteers by
their skill sets, regions, and so on.
It was an invaluable process to have
in place. With it, the coordination team
was able to find the people with the
right skillsets—such as wireless
technology experts or those who work
with Internet service providers (ISPs)
and cell-server providers—to assign to
critical needs. Hundreds of employees
were assigned to provide technical
support. Others immediately underwent
Red Cross training—a mandatory step
before volunteers would be allowed into
the disaster area—and were deployed in
the disaster zones between Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Still
others were organized at local centers
that were preparing to receive evacuees,
at fund-raisers for relief efforts, and
with other important response groups.
For example, during "Shelter from the
Storm: A Concert for the Gulf Coast,"
the network TV-sponsored fund-raiser for
hurricane relief, several large
corporations were asked to provide call
centers for accepting pledges. Intel
didn't have a call center that could be
harnessed that quickly with the number
of seats that were needed. However, the
modern technology in standard use at
Intel’s Folsom site allowed Intel to
reconfigure the desk-side equipment into
a virtual call-center. Friday evening
September 9, the night of the concert,
600 Intel employees gathered in Folsom
to accept phone calls and take pledges,
helping to raise millions of dollars for
relief efforts.
Immediate
Response
Even as floodwaters submerged New
Orleans, Intel mangers were already on
the phone, organizing a response. Said
Cox, "When we went into this, when we
gathered the night the levies were
breaching, we were saying, 'Oh, God,
what are we going to do to help?' We
knew we had to act quickly, to figure
out immediately where our resources
could have the most critical impact for
those tens of thousands of people who
were fighting to stay alive."
Wendy Hawkins of the Intel Foundation
had already prepared for the first
counter-punch. As the first shocking
damage reports came in, she immediately
pledged $1 million for hurricane relief.
The Foundation then offered to match
every dollar Intel employees gave, up to
another $1 million. (To date, Intel and
its employees have donated over $7
million.)
The Intel team also approached the
Red Cross Organization with an offer of
assistance. "That was absolutely the
right decision," said Cox. "It gave us
the ability to support a tremendous
number of people throughout the region,
rather than help only pockets of people
here and there."
By the time the Labor Day Weekend
ended (September 5), Intel's
coordination team had a people process
in place, a hardware process in place,
and a "fellow-traveler" process for
working with other technology companies
that would be needed to provide complete
solutions. As damage assessments and
critical needs lists began to come in,
the Intel team was ready to act.
Intel
Redirected
Because of Intel's expertise in
Wi-Fi* solutions and
WiMAX technology, the Intel team
initially thought the Red Cross would
ask them to help set up wireless
communications. Instead, they were told
that the biggest contribution would be
to help the Red Cross in setting up
computers at relief sites.
Explained Cox, "The Red Cross is
primarily focused on three critical,
basic human needs: shelter, food,
clothing. Everything else is gravy. So
they didn't need WiMAX at their relief
centers. They needed us to help them do
their jobs; processing evacuees and
helping these devastated people find
their loved ones and get their lives
back. WiMAX was a critical need for the
region, not for the Red Cross shelters."
Intel employee Beck Devenyns prepares
laptops, Internet phones and other
electronic gear at the Baton Rouge
Center on Thursday, September 8.
The team immediately regrouped and
came back with a two-pronged plan to
help both the Red Cross and people in
the affected regions. The Wi-Fi and
WiMAX efforts, led by Nigel Ballard and
Paul Butcher, would address the needs of
the larger, more permanent, regional
picture. In the meantime, for the Red
Cross, the coordination team would
direct its efforts toward becoming a
temporary laptop supply business.
Scrambling
for Systems
From the outset, relief organizations
anticipated that there would be
approximately 150 relief sites that
would need communications. One of the
requests to Intel was to ask if the
company could get 150 enterprise-class
access points for those sites.
Explained Ballard, "The first thing I
did Saturday morning (of Labor Day
weekend) was phone every supplier I
could think of to find one that had that
many access points in stock. Then I had
to find an Intel person who could put
$106,000 on his credit card by Saturday
noon, because we needed the equipment
then and there." Added Ballard,
"Normally, the bigger the company, the
slower and thicker the treacle. Instead,
we actually managed everything by noon.
I was amazed at how a company this size
could make things happen so easily."
For the laptop-supply team, the main
challenge was coordinating the donation,
build, and deployment of 4,000 laptops.
Intel employee Truman Oliver prepares
IBM laptops for shipment from a
Red Cross center in Austin, Texas. Intel
coordinated the donation of
thousands of laptops for emergency
shelters across the gulf coast.
Intel volunteers scrambled to acquire
and build the PCs, taking them out of
Intel's inventory or purchasing them
directly from other OEMs at heavily
discounted rates. Networking equipment,
such as switches and routers, cables,
etc., was hurriedly gathered over the
weekend so that the technology could be
organized and packaged in drop kits
ready to go at a moment's notice. Each
kit provided a small wireless
communications center, with at least
five laptops, all the required cabling,
extra batteries, a printer, and access
points for the wireless communication.
Whatever It Takes
As amazingly organized as it was, the
process had been put together on
it was fraught with potential mishaps.
At one point, Intel teams had a lot of
equipment gathered, but for a variety of
logistics reasons, couldn't get it
deployed to the areas where it was
needed. With time a critical factor,
they decided not to wait for other
direction, and the team instead simply
rented trucks, loaded them with the
hardware, and drove the 400 to 800 miles
to the necessary locations.
Said Cox, "It was a creative,
resourceful group, and the attitude was,
whatever it takes."
This attitude was seen over and over
again. On Ballard's team, one of the
first major challenges encountered was
getting their hands on the cutting-edge
equipment needed to set up a WiMAX
network. WiMAX is currently an
experimental, point-to-point or
point-to-multipoint solution. The
3.65-GHz technology, which reaches much
further than Wi-Fi, is not licensable
yet for use in the U.S., so few
corporations have it. Ballard's team,
determined to get the system for relief
efforts, finally contacted a partner
company—Redline—in Canada.
Explained Ballard, "We told Redline
we needed some of this equipment, and
that we needed it tomorrow in the
disaster area, 3,000 kilometers (about
1,800 miles) away. They had very little
of it, some of which was installed on
their roof, pointing at another building
for trial purposes—and it was storming
at the time. There was a pause on the
phone, then the Redline person said,
'You're expecting me to go up and take
the gear off and send it to you, aren't
you?' And we said, 'That's the spirit'."
They sent the equipment.
Fit-and-Forget Solution
With the technology on the way, Intel’s
Paul Butcher engaged MCI/Skytel
engineers who are based in the region to
install all the donated equipment.
"It's a disaster area," pointed out
Ballard. "Nobody has the luxury of
nursemaiding this technology. You need
to configure it, stick it up on the
pole, see the lights blinking, and move
on to install the next one."
To meet this challenge, Ballard's
team focused on providing an FAF, or
fit-and-forget, solution based on Wi-Fi
mesh radios and WiMAX technology. Mesh
radios are an excellent solution to
scenarios such as the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, because they can be
attached to a traffic or street light.
As long as the traffic or street light
has power, the wireless signal can hop
from that location to the next. And,
like a spider web, if one strand of the
radio mesh breaks, the network can
self-heal and route the signal through
another patch.
"Wi-Fi technology really shines in
this type of scenario," explained
Ballard. "It requires no wires, it can
reach long distances, and you can get a
network up and running within half an
hour, which was exactly what we did at
those 150 shelters."
Serious
Challenges
Even with the equipment in hand, teams
encountered serious challenges in
establishing the wireless network. The
first was power. Although some relief
sites had electricity, others were
without power or even a backup generator
to support the available communications
technology.
In other cases a community or town
might have power—called a back-haul
scenario—but the communications
connection to other towns was broken.
For example, the optical fiber might
have been split, or the conduit under
the ground had become water-logged and
the connections had shorted out. In
these cases, establishing a wireless
mesh allowed people to reach the next
infrastructure and communicate with the
rest of the world.
The second major challenge was
getting to locations themselves in order
to deploy the equipment. Many areas were
still impossible to reach because of
flooding or debris, or other safety
issues.
Third, there was a shortage of
skilled manpower. There were simply not
enough engineers from Intel or other
companies who had received the Red Cross
training and could be allowed into the
disaster area. Those who were allowed
into the disaster zones worked, in many
cases, around the clock to configure and
deploy equipment to help speed recovery
efforts.
Finally, just as relief workers
seemed to be getting ahead, Hurricane
Rita bore down on the Gulf Coast. Intel
pulled all its volunteers out of the
area, for obvious safety reasons. Those
who lived in Texas went home to their
families. Others were immediately flown
home to ride out the storm. After Rita
passed, the teams had to pause for a day
to let the Red Cross assess the new
level of crisis, but were soon back on
planes, returning to the relief sites
and networks.
Technological Challenges
There were also numerous technological
challenges that had to be resolved
before some relief efforts, such as
setting up the WiMAX network, could be
attempted. In particular, one issue was
that the frequency used by WiMAX is
reserved for military ground-to-air
radar.
"We went to the FCC," said Ballard.
"We said, we have an emergency need, and
we would like to use this frequency in
this location. Within 12 hours, the FCC
said yes, go ahead."
It was an amazingly fast response—the
FCC simply cut through the bureaucracy,
recalled Ballard—enabling what is
thought to be the first real-world use
of WiMAX technology in the United
States.
View a map [PDF] that shows how
Intel and our technology partners helped
restore local connectivity to the
devastated region.
Said Cox, "The most impressive part
of the disaster-response process to me
was the triple-threat combination of raw
generosity, human spirit, and
leading-edge technology. You just can't
beat that."
Keys to
Deploying the Technology
One of the keys to the success of
Intel’s response was the availability of
technically skilled volunteers. Modern
and/or cutting-edge technology wasn't
simply thrust at relief organizations
whose workers needed to be focused on
devastated people. Instead, while relief
workers continued processing evacuees,
Intel employees coordinated with ISPs
(Internet service providers) in the
area, readied the equipment, deployed
the systems, and set up a complete
distribution network.
For example, 20 Intel employees were
sent to the Red Cross distribution
center in Austin, Texas. Most of the
engineers had flown to Texas on short
notice, not knowing exactly how they
were going to help, but knowing they
were needed. Several, such as Paul
Dickey, worked 30 hours straight to
build and image the systems as quickly
as possible with the Red Cross build—a
unique, somewhat problematic build that
was required on all Red Cross laptops,
and which proved to be a time-consuming
challenge.
"Without the kind of focus that Paul
Dickey and the others brought to the
scene, we would never have gotten off
the ground in helping the Red Cross,"
said Cox. "We had the brilliant
engineers, we had their skills and
expertise, we had their willingness to
give up their days and nights for the
evacuees, but all of the work would have
been for naught if we couldn't get the
software build to work."
Fully imaged laptops were quickly
brought into the shelters, including 350
in the Houston Astrodome, where 15,000
Louisiana residents had been evacuated.
Intel volunteers then manned the
machines and taught the often
technologically naive Red Cross workers
how to use the systems to help evacuees
locate family members, friends, social
security numbers, and even pets they’d
had to leave behind.
The computer center at the Houston
Astrodome bustles with activity. Intel
helped
set up 350 laptops there that Red Cross
volunteers used to find permanent
shelter
for 3,000 evacuees within 24 hours.
As a result, on the first day the
laptops were deployed, relief workers
were able to register, process, and find
homes, family members, or alternative
housing for 3,000 people.
Said Cox, "That told us immediately
that we were doing the right thing."
Critical
Registrations
It's difficult for many to understand
the magnitude of the importance of
registering evacuees until the purpose
of that processing is clear.
Although thousands of people
evacuated the danger zone before
Hurricane Katrina hit and were assigned
to prepared shelters (such as the
Houston Astrodome), tens of thousands
more were stranded in offsite or
outlying shelters, such as in churches,
meeting halls, and football stadiums.
Those structures did not have IT
infrastructures before the hurricane,
and had no power or communications
infrastructure afterwards.
For the people at those sites, there
was simply no way for them to contact
their loved ones. Until they could be
located, family and friends at other
shelters assumed they were missing
and/or presumed dead. The Red Cross
database was one of the only ways
evacuees could attempt to locate loved
ones, but the only way they could
register on the database was to somehow
gain Internet access—in an area without
equipment, power, or a communications
infrastructure.
With access to the Internet and the
Red Cross database, uprooted evacuees
could register, family and friends could
locate them, and they could reassure
others of their survival.
Softening
the Suffering
Intel's work to bring relief to the
disaster area has been an extensive
project, not just in organizing its
people, but in integrating a variety of
proven and experimental technology
solutions in a rugged, real-world
scenario.
"I wasn't surprised that the
technology worked," said Cox. "I
expected that. What surprised me was the
fact that the widespread application of
today's technologies—laptops, databases,
and wireless networks—could reduce human
suffering so greatly. For all of us,
that was an enormous wake-up call."
An important point about the networks
Intel helped establish was that they
were deliberately left open. Anyone with
Wi-Fi technology access—a huge number of
laptops in the U.S. alone—could get on
the network, search the Web, email
family and friends, and connect with
loved ones. It is an excellent example
of an open solution that gave people
critical help in a time of need.
Cox summed it up: "The technology
gave evacuees a tool—even a lifeline—in
their terrible circumstance. It helped
them find their loved ones, making their
situation more survivable and more
bearable, and it made them feel
connected with the world, helping them
understand that the world was still out
there, wanting to help. These simple,
affordable laptops and networks—which
many of us have begun to take for
granted—provided many devastated people
with hope, helping them get back on
their feet, and giving them a path out
of despair."
Summary
Now that the immediate human suffering
has been reduced, Intel is turning its
attention to setting up business
processes that will be more efficient
and easier to deploy in future disaster
scenarios. The goal is to create a model
for the technology industry and other
businesses to use when fast responses
are needed.
"Everything we've learned in the haze
of this crisis, we are committed to
putting down on paper," said Cox. "If we
can document it, we can share it. If we
can share it, we can help build a
community that, when the bell rings, is
ready to go."
For Intel, the technology is just the
bones of the recovery effort. The heart
is its people, whose technical
expertise, business skills, and
generosity helped bring comfort, not
just communication, to communities
across the Gulf Coast.
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