Epidemic as Teacher

THE "GOLDEN SHADOW" AND "DARK WINTER" SCENARIOS BOTH LOOKED AT BIOWARFARE RESPONSE—BUT FROM COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES.

Last month I met Eric Rasmussen of InSTEDD at the Gov 2.0 conference here in DC. He mentioned a bioterror exercise that InSTEDD and some San Francisco Peninsula agencies had conducted in 2008 called Golden Shadow, which immediately reminded me of 2001's Dark Winter exercise (see Comparison, below).

I asked Eric and his colleague Mary Jane Marcus for the scripts participants had used for the exercise—considering that InSTEDD is fairly modest about Golden Shadow on its Web site—and they were nice enough to oblige.

Golden Shadow examined how newer technologies might help first responders better coordinate their response to a pneumonic-plague attack on a rock concert in San Jose. This exercise was intensely local, as opposed to Dark Winter's National Security Council bunker, all-the-president's-men approach.

Besides InSTEDD, participants included the Menlo Park Fire District, San Mateo County's public health department, three area neighborhoods, a health clinic and a school. Participants went out into the field, knocked on doors to assess the epidemic's progress, distributed "antibiotics," and sent and received both planned and ad hoc messages to an emergency communications center (ECC).

Notably, InSTEDD developed software that let volunteers report from the field via online forms, text messages, GPS-linked photos, and blog entries. "This field information was then portrayed in Google Earth at the Emergency Communications Center, ... the headquarters for first responders. For the first time, firefighters and public health officials could see the crisis in real time as it unfolded in the field." In other words, Golden Shadow emphasized information-sharing from the field and among agencies, and visualizing that information at a central location to enhance decision-makers' situational awareness.

Interestingly, Golden Shadow assumed a great deal of friction—Clausewitz's "fog of war"—from the outset. For instance, all computer-based information was transferred through donated INMARSAT satellite time rather than landline-based Internet, reflecting the possibility that landlines may be unusable during a disaster.

(This assumption helps agencies operate better in disasters, a topic I touched on in the SF Weekly 13 years ago and that Lin Wells and STAR-TIDES have elevated into an art form.)

Golden Shadow also assumed that ordinary people make data-entry errors, run out of antibiotics, wonder what to do with victims' bodies, and get spooked by the epidemic; one participant reads this note during the scenario's second hour: " You develop symptoms—a cough (not bloody) but you are concerned."

In addition, edgy civilians complicate matters by "approaching" volunteers in the field demanding prophylaxis, or take the law into their own hands by confining people they think are sick to their own houses.

These touches are a refreshing change from scenarios that assume you start with your full complement of capabilities—all your day-to-day technology operational, a focused and rested staff, and citizens who act altruistically as well as selfishly.

So how did Golden Shadow go? Given that it explicitly focused on whether certain tools could be used in a disaster-response setting rather than how well they did, and on social as much as technological factors, this exercise generated a lot of useful information:

Pluses
—First responders communicated well among themselves using FRS (walkie-talkies) and SMS (text) messaging, preferring more advanced forms of data communications to report outside their own communities.

—Geo-blogs, micro-geo blogs, and GPS-linked photos helped make field reports more intuitive by correlating data immediately with geographic location.

—People will use what they're most familiar with, meaning old favorites such as walkie-talkies and ham radio got a workout compared with their higher-tech brethren. This implies that more-intense training on technologies such as Google Earth could turn that technology into a real aid to situational awareness.

Minuses
—That said, Google Earth didn't function as well as hoped, primarily because it requires some training to use and participants had difficulty loading different layers of data into it. In addition, Google Earth's latitude/longitude system didn't play well with the fire department's geographic system, which centers on street addresses.

—Volunteers sent much information "upstream" to the ECC, but didn't receive much in return fromITAL the ECC, which was overwhelmed by a data flow purposely designed to have a wide range of relevance.

—Volunteers questioned which modality to use to transmit different types of information; for example, one volunteer used SMS to announce that riots were beginning in her neighborhood when ham radio or a cell-phone voice call might have gotten more attention.

To paraphrase one participant, you can see the an interesting new future peeking out around the edges of this exercise. Hopefully, when more funding can be found (or cash-strapped California resumes its statewide Golden Guardian exercises), we'll see more of this type of scenario used to test both new technologies and old-fashioned interagency cooperation.


Comparison
Dark Winter (2001): Top-down, Andrews Air Force Base, simulated three National Security Council meetings over 14 days of real time. Checked how well federal, state and local governments worked together vs. smallpox attack. Former Sen. Sam Nunn played a U.S. president who, amidst news of rising geopolitical instability, receives word that cases of smallpox have been detected in Oklahoma City, Atlanta and Philadelphia. Produced some rather grim findings.

Golden Shadow (2008): Bottom-up, northern California, simulated operation of first responders and emergency command center over several "days," taking four hours of real time. Checked how well bottom-up reporting worked vs. pneumonic-plague attack. No politicians or celebrities involved; further notable for including the wretched stepchild of Peninsula cities, East Palo Alto, in a marquee exercise. Produced some encouraging prospects for future exercises.