Smartphones, social media tied into ELERTS emergency system

November 02, 2011 — CSO — The lost-child story has a happy ending. But better use of mobile technology probably could have brought that happy ending sooner and eliminated an hour or so of hysterical anxiety for a frantic mother. It is one of the stories that prompted Chris Russo, a veteran deputy fire chief in the Massachusetts coastal town of Hull, to launch ELERTS, an emergency communication system that uses smart phones and social media to communicate with first responders and other emergency personnel.

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November 02, 2011 — CSO —

The lost-child story has a happy ending. But better use of mobile technology probably could have brought that happy ending sooner and eliminated an hour or so of hysterical anxiety for a frantic mother.

It is one of the stories that prompted Chris Russo, a veteran deputy fire chief in the Massachusetts coastal town of Hull, to launch ELERTS, an emergency communication system that uses smart phones and social media to communicate with first responders and other emergency personnel.

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A 7-year-old boy had gone into a bathhouse at the beach, he recalls, but wasn't seen coming out. The child's mother, who didn't speak English well, was so hysterical that she couldn't even tell first responders what color shorts he had on, but feared he had been abducted.

"And we had four miles of beach, with 40,000 or 50,000 people on it," Russo says.

Two hours later, a helicopter pilot finally spotted the boy on the beach. "But if we could have pushed out a picture or a description of the child (to those with smart phones), we probably would have located him an hour and a half earlier," he says.

It was this and similar situations that got him thinking: "I've been a first responder for 25 years," he says, "and I just started thinking that we're surrounded by all this technology, and that with smart phones on mobile platforms, we could get a lot more from the general public than from a bunch of 911 calls."

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Indeed, people have been taking pictures of disasters, accidents and other events for years, and posting them on Facebook and Twitter or sending them to media outlets. But they did not have a way to send them to emergency responders.

That led Russo two years ago to create ELERTS, which provides a free app for smart phones with the Apple or Android operating systems, available at their respective app stores. In an emergency, users can send pictures or other information to emergency managers, to help them decide how best to respond.

The system uses Google maps to pinpoint the location.

At the other end, emergency managers at government agencies, colleges, universities and other organizations, using a cloud-based management console, can send out warning messages about weather, floods, accidents, fires, missing children, terrorist attacks and any other type of emergency, telling people how to stay out of harm's way.