Irish charity busy rebuilding wifi networks in disaster zones

The White House is probably the last place a technology-oriented Loughrea couple thought they’d be visiting as guests. But they’ll be there next week, invited by the US government disaster relief agency FEMA, for a special meeting with groups the agency believes might pave the way to better disaster response in the future.

Evert and Kate Bopp – well known in blogger and social media circles in Ireland – got the invitation to join FEMA's new Innovation Team after their charitable organisation, Disaster Tech Lab ( disastertechlab.org) provided critical communications networks support in the New York area after super storm Sandy, as well as ongoing relief and rebuilding work in earthquake-devastated Haiti.

Bopp, self-described on his LinkedIn profile as a “wifi geek, tech start-up junkie, likes to use technology to do good help others”, began thinking about how critical good communications were to rescue work when he watched the 2004 tsunami disaster unfold in Thailand.

“I was looking at the news. There were representatives of hundreds of aid agencies, and supplies coming in, but no coordination. Basically, that was because of a lack of communications. I thought about how you could do a wifi network over large areas and that could be of huge benefit.”

Technical challenge

Thinking about the technical challenge became something to puzzle over casually, in his spare time. Over the next couple of years, he worked out some network diagrams for setting up such a system, “but never really did anything with the ideas until I was back in Ireland, and watching the reports coming in from the huge earthquake in Haiti and thought, maybe it was time to get up and do something about it.”

Anyone active in the Irish blog and Twitter community will remember Bopp’s appeals for financial support and equipment at the time for his new organisation, Haiti Connect. Thanks to social networks, he started getting equipment, but not enough.

One major donor of equipment was Aruba Networks, halfway around the world in Sunnyvale, California. After Bopp posted a list of the remaining equipment he needed – about $250,000 worth – adding that if he could get even part of it, he would be happy, up popped an email at 1am from Aruba: a shipping list for the full list of the equipment. He was astonished at the generosity of a company that has remained a major supporter of the couple’s work.

But now, he needed to get it all to Haiti. “We used what was there at the time: the kids college fund,” he says with a laugh. Kate stayed in Ireland to mind the children, and Evert went to Haiti with a relief team.

In Haiti, they held a flurry of meetings with non-governmental organisations, local telecommunications companies, UN agencies, health care workers, and others helping with the relief effort.

“I initially thought, ‘yeah, I’ll do that for about six months and hopefully the Haitian government, etc, will have stepped in’. Two or three years on, we have completed about 30 projects. There was a much larger need – to move from disaster response to rebuilding mode.”

The group have been involved in setting up internet access to schools, hospitals, and clinics. “We got the Haiti Connect board together to start thinking of expanding. Ideally, we thought we might aim to have one to two pallets of equipment at six airports around the world that are strategic for disaster efforts. The pallets would have mostly equipment for setting up wifi networks – routers, switches and things like that. We would have the volunteers ready to do short-term disaster work.”

They also have started to work on an app that could be used to make access much easier to ad-hoc communications networks set up during disasters.

Security problem

One problem, says Bopp, is that if the network is kept highly secure, with individual devices requiring validation, often the people who most need fast access, can’t get on it. On the other hand, if the network is left open, someone not involved with the relief effort might come online and scupper relief communications by sending or receiving bandwidth hogging photos or video.

To reach these goals, they set up a subsidiary to Haiti Connect called Disaster Tech Lab, not sure if this longer term project would come together at all. But within months, thanks to Hurricane Sandy, Disaster Tech Lab has become the main organisation.

“I didn’t think, if it would happen, that it would happen this quickly. This was really due to first, the amount of interest we got from other organisations to set this up, and second, when we got a call about Sandy.” The call came from a disaster relief organisation called Humanity Road, which Haiti Connect had worked with extensively.

“They said, ‘We have no telecoms out here, could you come build some networks?’ They called us on Sunday, and we had guys on the ground in New York on Tuesday.” They went to work building wifi networks which could use satellite connectivity, initially in three fire stations. Working with FEMA and the fire department, “we were quite flooded with demands”.

The group did extensive work in the Rockaway area of Queens, building out a network covering the whole area, on request from FEMA and the National Guard. Bopp says it was hard work, requiring lots of site surveys to find suitable locations and with constantly shifting demands from relief organisations.

Part of the problem, Bopp says, was that telecommunications companies were unwilling to share information on what parts of the network were down, an issue he resolved by walking the full length of the area with his mobile and laptop, checking to see where telecommunications and wifi networks came up or dropped out.

Another difficulty was that the telecommunications companies would send in emergency, portable wifi stations, but because the effort was uncoordinated, so many went in that the signals were interfering with each other, knocking out communications.

Disaster Tech Lab is still in New York, helping to maintain communications networks.

Then came the invitation in mid January, to join the FEMA Innovation Team, and come out to the White House for a meeting on February 6th.

“It’s a FEMA roundtable, for policy discussions. They invited a handful of people from private organisations – they liked the proposals I was putting in,” Bopp says.

The advantage of having FEMA support is “it puts a whole lot more resources behind what we do. But we still get the majority of stuff from private donations, from companies like Aruba.”

With Disaster Tech Lab’s fast growth, Bopp is now focused fully on disaster relief. The next goal will be to expand donor support, to help get their app and relief pallets ready for the next disaster, which will require basics such as insurance, transport costs and resources for volunteers.

“I’ve switched from doing it part-time to full-time,” he says – still amazed at how a one-off effort turned into a full-time, internationally recognised calling.