EMERGENCY EVACUATIONS
ON THE RIGHT TRACK
When people get caught up in an emergency while they’re travelling for work, it is still the employer’s responsibility to keep them safe. Colin Dale, director of business development at Vismo Global Tracking Solutions explains how mobile apps can help get personnel to safety.
Natural disasters and emergencies cannot be prevented. However, with proper warnings, the effects can be significantly reduced. With our 24/7 “always on” society, complete with rolling news on TV and online - and updates on Twitter and Facebook by people on the ground - relatives and friends of those affected can be kept up to date on events as they unfold.
But what about those working in or passing through affected areas? An industrial complex suffering explosions, or cities such as Paris, during the Charlie Hebdo shootings, or Kabul, Afghanistan, at election time, when explosions rocked the city and relatives of UN staff and employers of TV camera crews were anxious about their safety - what then?
Again, technology comes to the fore, although its solutions are typically not in the public eye. Take the incident at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris in January this year. Unknown to most of the general public, 90 people were in possession of a Vismo people tracking app in the French capital that day. Typically employees of disparate organisations, they were in town on business or on their way somewhere else.
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As soon as the shootings were known about, employer organisations were alerted and able to pinpoint on an online map exactly where their people were in relation to the Charlie Hebdo offices and later the supermarket where a gunman had taken hostages. Those organisations were able to quickly send texts to the 90 people, giving them reassuring advice and information.
For reasons of confidentiality I cannot disclose details of which employers were in direct contact with their employees in Paris, but users of people-tracking apps include many FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 firms and major financial services names, retailers and those in oil and gas.
Several NGO agencies also use the apps, which can be deployed on Android, iPhone and iPad, BlackBerry 7 and BlackBerry 10 devices as well as standalone trackers. For those areas where there is no mobile coverage, Vismo can be deployed on the Iridium Extreme handset and RockSTAR satellite tracking device to give true “pole to pole” coverage.
The apps come with a number of features and follow-up complementary actions designed
to help with emergency evacuation situations and in hotspots where the provision of any kind of knowledge and assistance is vital.
INTEGRATION
AND EVACUATION In the event of major incidents, Vismo liaises closely with emergency services (fire, police, ambulance and rescue organisations) to share information and optimise the chance of successful outcomes. This liaison typically starts when a user of an app presses the panic button, triggering an email or text alert to those services. We can integrate that notification, and others if more panic buttons are pressed, with information about the location of the individual or individuals affected. The location is put into a third party mapping solution – one used by any or all of the emergency services.
Meanwhile, in major emergencies requiring evacuation of personnel, the user organisation typically sends its affected personnel instructions by text, including, for example, advice about a standby aircraft at the nearest safe airport or about other means of getting away from the affected area.
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