Zello: The ‘Cajun Navy’s’ secret weapon for saving lives

https://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/harvey/index.html

It looks like USGS has most of their activity here: https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/hurricane-harvey

Water rescuers were given a general idea of an area that could be assumed flooded throughout, but boaters had to exercise caution at all times because of water hazards (both stationary and mobile) and flood waters could subside without warning, leaving some boats stranded on shallow mud flats.

While it was somewhat life-threatening with water rescues, the lack of data could be worked around because the water rise to the point it was life-threatening was reckoned in 15-30 minute intervals, and people could coordinate rescues of rescuers around that timeframe. However, in a fire response version of such Net-based coordination, accurate, up-to-the-second assessment would be life-critical. Not sure how to address that without industrial-grade drones or even UAV's, and hella-expensive grade FLIR, and the FAA (and possibly DHS) would then be deeply involved.

Not sure why UAV-based realtime GIS mapping wasn't deployed. The hardware tech exists, but perhaps the pipeline for data ingestion, cleanup, processing and publishing isn't up to realtime demands, even for a limited scope of "show me what is different from this satellite GIS map of the same area". That would be an interesting problem to solve, correcting for daylight shadows, transient objects like cars and planes, etc.; I'm sure the military intelligence folks in the IMINT sector have long since worked out the initial challenges of this problem space, but open algorithms for applying to this problem space (not to speak of code) don't seem readily available to me after searching around, so it might be a long slog up the learning curve.

These disasters might be a good application of temporary air mobile vehicles supplying some form of wireless signal. If you're going to loft up a vehicle into the air to collect realtime GIS, you might as well blanket the area with an emergency wireless signal. Would have to solve problems around rate-limiting, dynamic prioritization based upon confirmed emergencies, etc.

The flooding points out to me the lack of research into flood waters diversion [1]; there is still a lot we don't know about what happens when we try to mitigate excess flood waters. We know at least some flooding is necessary for managing topsoil erosion. But even the $26B estimate to bring Houston up to a more hardened flooding posture [2] seems like cheap insurance compared to the $100B estimates being thrown around now. I've wondered if it is possible, and what it would take to build a national water grid that intakes excess flood waters in one region of the nation, processes it so it is ecologically "clean" of invasive species, and shunts it to a drier region. The capacity of such an infrastructure within the channels themselves might lessen the need for designated floodwater storage plains, and simultaneously vastly increase land utilization. However, megascale infrastructure projects still seem out of our grasp in this era.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160106114744.h...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/how-m...

You can find knockoff PTT devices on eBay but they don't have momentary switches, so you have to remember to click once to speak and again to clear the channel and any accidental brush against the toggle can end up blocking the channel indefinitely. And that's the third problem with Zello: its "only one person may speak at once" nature.

As I mentioned previously, this really seems like the same problem a music festival faces just at a different scale. If someone could build an app that supports Glastonbury or Burning Man that could be the commercial underpinning that lets this hypothetical app donate services during a disaster.

You'd already know how to add and allocate people to bands of channels based on their role and responsibilities. And how to deal with griefers who try to channel dominate or block for their own selfish or stupid ends.

Heck maybe Zello (or this hypothetical app) add a more WhatsApp-like buffered playback mode that means people just queue for whose message is heard next but no one hears anything from you until your transmission ends, rather than trying to make your cellphone literally emulate a two way radio or Sprint/Nextel phone.

That would also mean you could just see the previous stream of talk activity and play it back on joining or rejoining a channel. Add a way to tag conversations with rescue numbers and you can even make accessing data about a given rescue searchable.

Sounds like a fun project. If anyone needs an SRE guy when they get ycombinator funding look me up. :-)

One last note to potential investors: the Department of Homeland Security established CERT to let the general public be trained for assisting first responders. Included in that training is buying a go bag of your own for basic first aid. Adding a $10 waterproof PTT switch to your bag is not unreasonable. (Asking people to shell out $50-$175 which is what current Zello ptt adapters cost is too much IMHO).

Anyway one could potentially sell this to the government although that would probably mean FEMA coordinating the onboarding of users and devices during a disaster for both the good and bad it implies.

Did they indeed have more equipment and plans and stuff? Is there some clear role that they played and were clearly beneficial in this emergency? Could/would not almost everything they did that was useful be done by civilians in their absence?

I'm not impressed. I don't understand why the National Guard(NG) was necessary. Early on, the government agencies and NG brought trucks and helicopters; civilians wisely brought boats. [OK, to be fair, later the NG brought some amphibious vehicles and boats, but we're not taking Omaha beach here, folks]. Mostly the National Guard and FEMA guys in the field just stood around their trucks at attention or drove around. The inside people _did_ help set up shelters, food, etc. The helicopter fellows _did_ some rescuing but I question the value of that since helicopters are costly to run, dangerous (they fail frequently with disastrous consequences), cost like heck to maintain and the same thing can usually be done far more safely with a boat (or a lifesaving ring).

National Guard might possibly serve in a policing function but New Orleans/Katrina pretty much showed how that can fail. NG isn't really a policing agency, it's part of an army. Armies are good at killing people and I want my Army to be strong in that manner. So let them train and deploy at that.

Events like hurricane Harvey appear to be mostly minor training operations and photo ops for the National Guard. "Feel-Good" stuff, in other words. It might be best for the victims _and_ the NG if the NG didn't participate. And it would save our tax dollars.

Local law enforcement agencies (the various police and sheriffs' offices in the Houston area) have plenty of law enforcement officers familiar with local terrain and culture who are eager to earn overtime pay policing flood areas. They're also less likely to bust a cap in your ass for stealing gasoline.

"The Secret History of Hurricane Katrina"

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/08/secret-histor...

("My house is beginning to flood and I'm concerned about my safety" is a very different situation than "Someone was just involved in a vehicle collision and requires an ambulance")