October '05 Newsletter

As bulldozers cleared away debris in New Orleans earlier this month, a team of researchers from CITRIS’s Katrina Recovery Task Force (KRTF) was racing ahead of construction crews, gathering vital data on what went wrong before it disappeared for good.

“It was a rush. We would come to a site and would figure out what had happened. Two hours later, bulldozers had covered the critical information. In some cases, if we hadn’t gotten there first, those sites would have been mysterious perhaps forever. So it was a very urgent task,” recalls UC Berkeley civil and environmental engineering professor Raymond Seed of the trip.

This urgent fact-finding mission is just one of several efforts that’s already been launched by the newly formed task force. CITRIS has brought together academics whose expertise ranges from organizational behavior to offshore oil infrastructure and vulnerabilities in levees. Their goals range from studying what went wrong in New Orleans to providing immediate and long-term assistance as the storm-afflicted Gulf Coast region plans and builds its new infrastructure. As was the case during the hurricane itself, speed has proven critical to making a difference.

Realizing it was important to act fast, CITRIS Director Shankar Sastry called for an emergency town hall meeting on Sept. 8. With the chaotic aftermath of Katrina still playing out live on television, professors from UC Berkeley and UC Merced shared their expertise over a live video link and began forming a plan for immediate action. In early October, two fact-finding teams were deployed to New Orleans for a week at a time with seed funding from CITRIS and the National Science Foundation. There they gathered data alongside the Army Corps of Engineers and other researchers—and often just in the nick of time--offered advice on immediate problems and planned for ongoing collaboration.

For Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor and task force member Robert Bea, who along with Professor John Radke is leading the task force’s study of the offshore and coastal infrastructure, the visit was personal as well as professional. Bea, who’s worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, Shell, and Bechtel on pipeline infrastructure, lost his home in 1965’s to Hurricane Betsy. He describes his visit to New Orleans with one of the KRTF teams as “déjà vu.”

To avoid a repeat of recent events, experts need a centralized place where they can disseminate and share information. To that end, Professor and task force member John Radke is building a digital library. Radke says the library will be designed “so that everyone gathering data in the field could contribute it.” He also plans to build a spatially encoded “map” of the area, that brings together data from the U. S. Geological Service, the Multiple Listings Service, and other databases. A similar tool built by Radke for the 1991 East Bay Hills firestorm has been used to identify ways to prevent future fires and assess property values and risks. That disaster killed 25 people and resulted in $1.5 billion in damage.

Of course, there are many aspects of this recent disaster that don’t neatly fit into a database. As Haas Business School Professor Karlene Roberts pointed out during the Town Hall meeting: “This began as a weather problem. It quickly moved to an engineering problem and then a set of organizational problems.” An expert in organizational behavior, Roberts is leading the KRTF study of the human social dynamics such as health care, law enforcement, and evacuation that played a critical role in the Katrina disaster.

Policy reform is another major goal of this task force. Seed, for one, is hoping that the current attention on levees will cause politicians to rethink how that critical infrastructure is managed in this country. For example, a levee failure along California’s Sacramento and Delta levees could result in a mass water shortage in Southern California and catastrophic damage to the state’s capital. Yet Seed says these and many others across the country are not adequately maintained.

“It’s a very dicey patchwork and we have tenuous situations in most of the fifty states. I’m going to Washington and a lot of people there are seeking to know more about this, because in the end how we construct and design levees and who has oversight over that is a policy issue for the nation,” Seed says.

While the task force’s immediate aim is to provide whatever help they can in building a stronger, better equipped Gulf Coast, it is preventing and reducing the damage from potential disasters, like a major levee failure in California, that will sustain their efforts over the long run.

“We envision a national center for catastrophic risk reduction. The lessons we are learning here have implications not only for Southern Louisiana but also California and the rest of the world,” says Bea.

For more information:

In firefighting, access to good information is critical to making split-second decisions, especially in treacherous high-rise buildings where the conditions are chaotic and extremely stressful on a good day. Yet when these brave men and women arrive on the scene, they often have little more than a hand-held radio receiving directions from Incident Command (IC) below to guide them.

Thanks to a unique collaboration between the Chicago Fire Department and Berkeley graduate students, the way these dangerous high-rise fires are fought soon could change radically. Called Fire Information and Rescue Equipment (FIRE), the system they’ve developed provides firefighters with the real-time information crucial to making good life-and-death decisions via an interactive display mounted right inside the firefighter’s mask dubbed FireEye. CITRIS researcher and Associate Dean of the College of Engineering Paul Wright has been supervising the project.

With its tall skyline and long history of fighting dangerous fires, the Chicago Fire Department is perhaps more aware than most of what’s at stake for firefighters who battle high-rise blazes, making their experience and insights invaluable to the project.

“When firefighters go into a large high-rise building, often smoke is filling the hallways and corridors over a few different floors and there is little or no visibility. All they have is their handheld radios to communicate with the incident commander outside, and sometimes those don’t work, especially if they’re 60 stories up or if multiple people are talking on the same channel at the same time. They’re not actually carrying a paper floor plan because that would be impractical. So it’s really easy for them to get lost,” explains Joel Wilson, a fourth-year graduate student in mechanical engineering who has worked closely with the fire department on the design and user interface for the FireEye.

The shortcomings of this system tragically came to light on September 11, 2001, when New York City firefighters’ radios failed to work inside the World Trade Center. Many of the 343 firefighters who died on that day never received the repeated urgent commands for them to evacuate.

Indeed, it was one of Chicago’s responses to 9/11 that forms the backbone of FIRE. Shortly after that event, the city began requiring that all buildings over a certain height (currently 80 feet or approximately seven stories) submit updated electronic floor plans every six months. “The floor plans are really the beginning of this puzzle. Without them, you’re totally working blind,” says Wright. A component of FIRE called eICS (for electronic implementation of the Incident Command System) combines these maps with live data on not only the location of firefighters inside the building but also biometrics such as heart rate and air supply.

The next step is to get that critical information to those who need it. Enter SmokeNet. A wireless sensor network embedded in smart smoke detectors throughout the building, SmokeNet receives and sends critical information about smoke penetration, heat, and the whereabouts and status of personnel. Firefighters and IC aren’t the only ones to receive this data. It’s also sent to small LED stoplights mounted outside entranceways. A green light indicates to occupants and firefighters alike that it’s safe to enter, while a red light alerts them to dangerous conditions and yellow suggests caution.

The last and most crucial part of the system is the FireEye. Wright compares it to the “You are here” maps found at shopping malls and amusement parks, only in this system, the “you are here” map moves around showing you where you really are not just sort of where you are.” FireEye consists of a small computer, incorporated into the firefighter’s gear, with a tiny display, located inside the mask, as well as a radio beacon that communicates back-and-forth with SmokeNet. Using a small button, firefighters can zoom in and out of the map, figure out their location relative to their colleagues, and thus navigate more safely and effectively. Meanwhile, IC can keep tabs on everyone from below.

What makes this project particularly unique and effective has been the Chicago Fire Department’s close involvement. After reading in the MIT Technology Review about a head-mounted information system for motorcyclists designed by two of Wright’s students, Dan Steingart and Russell Romero, the fire department contacted Wright asking if they could design something similar for firefighters. Chicago has worked with the Berkeley team ever since, providing their real-world experience and advice to help shape the design process. For example, the FireEye has undergone multiple iterations based on feedback from Chicago.

“Chicago has really stepped up to the plate. They’re fighting fires on a daily basis. They know their protocols and strategies. They bring skills and experience we would never have. Without them we wouldn’t have had a really exciting interaction on this project,” says Wright.

The project was also made possible by the Ford Motor Company, a CITRIS Associate Corporate Member. Early prototypes of the FireEye were built at the Ford Prototype Lab, whose equipment is used in a number of CITRIS projects including the California Energy Commission’s Demand-Response program.

Although still in the prototype phase, the project is progressing rapidly. The Berkeley team presented FIRE at the Chicago Fire Department’s first High-Rise Life Safety Conference in August. Plans are underway at the Chicago Fire Department to rig their headquarters with a sensor network and test it out the system.

For more information:

Fire Information & Rescue Equipment

Chicago Fire Department

High-Rise Life Safety Conference

With cell phone towers and phone lines knocked out by Hurricane Katrina, police in New Orleans at one point resorted to communicating via a single radio channel on their walkie talkies. The Mississippi National Guard even employed what the Associated Press called “ancient battlefield tactics,” having runners sprint between commanders to get information across.

If recent events like these have tragically demonstrated the need for new communications technology that can function independently of infrastructure, then an ambitious, multidisciplinary project led by CITRIS-affiliated researcher J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves is aimed at figuring out how to build just that. Called Dynamic Ad-Hoc Wireless Network (DAWN), the project brings together scientists from seven leading universities to develop the underlying technology needed for scalable, ad-hoc or peer-to-peer wireless networks. The hope is that these networks could be relied upon for communication in rapidly changing environments like disaster areas or war zones.

“In the future, every rescue worker could have a wireless internetworking node (WIN) and this node would be able to relay information from other nodes and also store information until it gets close enough to other nodes to relay the information,” explains Garcia-Luna-Aceves, Jack Baskin Professor of Computer Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.

The main advantage of using WINs in such scenarios is that they would connect to one another rather than having to relay information back through a single hub, eliminating dependence on vulnerable infrastructures like cell phone towers and land lines. The resulting ad-hoc network would be designed to accommodate the influx of additional nodes as well as the exit of others. They could also send and receive other types of communications, such as text messages and photographs, with built-in memory sticks storing information whenever the network became unavailable.

To make all this happen, though, DAWN researchers first need to establish the underlying theory and protocols that will enable wireless networks to scale up in this fashion. “This project is really looking at the science of ad-hoc networks. The fact is that in military networks and even in commercial settings, we don’t know how to make networks scale and we’ve yet to take advantage of all these new physical layer technologies like storage and more sophisticated receivers,” says Garcia-Luna-Aceves.

One of the biggest challenges will be getting WINs to configure themselves automatically. In a typical internet connection, a client connects to a main server, but in ad-hoc wireless networks, there is no main server; the nodes connect directly to one another. As anyone who has set up a home internet connection knows, it's often necessary to take a number of configuration steps in order to get the service to work. On the other hand, nodes in constantly changing network would need to automatically do this as one rescue worker’s node came into or lost contact with another’s node.

Other challenges include security. Particularly in a military operation, you don’t just want anybody with a node to be able to leap onto the network. There are practical matters to consider as well, such as trade-offs between the size of the devices, the number and types of functions it can perform, and the amount of power it needs to function--plus, getting the protocol stack to line up so that all the various functions work together.

In order to bring about results in a timely manner, the project is being split up among researchers at seven top universities, UC Santa Cruz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Maryland. Collaborators from industry and the military are providing the teams with realistic scenarios to use in their simulations. The project is funded by a five-year, $5.2 million U.S. Department of Defense grant to be shared by the seven universities. The kick-off meeting was held on July 26.

For more information:

DAWN Project Web site

"UCSC to lead ambitious multidisciplinary research project on wireless communication networks" by Tim Stephens (UCSC press release, April 4, 2005)

J.J. Garcia-Luna-Aceves’s Web site