The Pacific Disaster Center
Information in Paradise
By James T. Wigdel

When it comes to exchanging emergency management information, the Pacific Disaster Center (PDC), located on the Island of Maui that residents call paradise, seems to do it all. It is an information processing center designed to furnish disaster information support to federal, state, local and regional emergency managers to support mitigation, preparation, response and recovery within the Pacific region. OK, but what is PDC…really?

The PDC's mission is to furnish valuable and timely information products and services for comprehensive emergency management in and around the Pacific and Indian Ocean regions during all phases of emergency management. Its operational activities include data collection, weather product development, imagery analysis, spatial data fusion and development of advanced products using modeling and simulation techniques.

PDC's Executive Director Joseph Lees said, "the objective is to provide better information support to emergency managers in the field at all levels of government and the private sector." He added the center is about providing the right information, at the right time, in the right form to the right person.

"Information flow is usually one of the greatest challenges in any disaster partly because we build our information systems in stove pipes," Lees said. "Information on transportation is built through somebody looking at it from a transportation stand point. Somebody from healthcare will be looking just at healthcare but disaster is one of those things that breaks through all the barriers. Now that everybody is affected, how do you work together or try to respond?"

What the PDC does is function as an integrator, connecting and focusing those individual entities that have a great deal of capability and information, so they work together as a system. "It's a big challenge," Lees said.

A big challenge is probably an understatement considering the PDC's area of responsibility, which covers 52 percent of the planet's surface and where statistically, about 70 percent of the world's disasters occur. Roughly half the world's population looks to the PDC to furnish information in the event of a typhoon, earthquake, tsunami or some other phenomenon that may affect a particular nation.

This is indeed a large responsibility for the staff of 40 employees with backgrounds as diverse as law, intelligence, weather and computers.

The threats in the area are real. Hawaii, home state of the PDC, has not experienced a tsunami since 1963 and is long overdue. After two decades of silence, the recent eruption of Northern Japan's Mount Usu displaced 15,300 residents of the town of Abuta leaving it virtually deserted save a few displaced family pets.

Usu is quiet for the moment and Abuta's residents have returned but with the Pacific Rim a hot-bed of geologic activity, earthquakes are happening almost daily and each earthquake is a potential tsunami. It's the PDC's responsibility to share this type of information with countries in the Asia-Pacific region so that lives may be saved, homes may be prevented from being demolished or swept away, and infrastructure may remain intact.

The concept of the PDC was first discussed in 1993 during the aftermath of Hurricane Iniki which struck Hawaii that year. "This has really been the vision of Senator Inouye," Lees said. "He has definitely been the champion of it since day one."

Early on, the PDC's development was managed by the State of Hawaii's Department of Defense but over time it was recognized that the PDC needed to serve a broader community. "Its area of responsibility grew from just being Hawaii, to being Hawaii and Alaska and then to include the Pacific insular states," Lees said. About two years ago, it grew again to become coextensive with the Commander-in-Chief Pacific's area of responsibility.

The PDC's budget is between $8 million and $10 million. Lees went on to say that the PDC is a growing concern whose ultimate goal is to become self-supporting. "Our goal is to make sure that we are providing so much value that people will be willing to pay for it … not necessarily the whole thing. I think the Department of Defense would prefer to be a customer of PDC rather than the sole owner because we really serve the whole community."

The PDC is already, to some degree, a private-public partnership. "As we partner with private companies, we try to actually have private companies do most of the work," Lees said.

Since the center's inception a key partner has been the state of Hawaii. A broad spectrum of Hawaii state and local agencies are members of the PDC Information Acquisition Working Group and are registered members.

Two of PDCs information-gathering partners are also close to home. "We work very closely with the Center of Excellence and Pacific Command's Virtual Information Center in producing primers and other situational awareness kinds of products," Lees said. "We are also working more and more with the COE on data gathering types of activities," he added.

In addition to its local partners, the PDC has many associates, some of whom operate on a global level. These include: NOAA, the National Weather Service, U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Transportation, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Commander-in-Chief Pacific.

It's the private-public partnership that enables PDC to gather and assimilate the vast amount of data needed to be a useful asset in its area of responsibility. It retrieves its data from a broad spectrum of federal, state, local, regional and commercial sources. Using this data, PDC is capable of producing over 70 different products including daily weather situation reports, weather imagery, tsunami travel time maps, tsunami evacuation maps, and storm tracking and flood inundation maps among others.

The PDC has two nodes. The primary node is located in the Maui Research Technology Park and the second is collocated with the Hawaii State Civil Defense Emergency Operating Center at Diamond Head Crater on the Island of Oahu. The Oahu node serves as the focal point for the PDC's wide area communications network.

It's through this network that PDC's products are distributed to regional emergency managers via a protected robust Intranet consisting of fiber optic cable, dedicated and frame relay commercial circuits and satellite links. This combination of telecommunication capabilities allows PDC to support users throughout its area of responsibility. The public can access general information about the PDC and other assets via PDC's Website at www.pdc.org.

At the heart of the information gathering network is the Global Information System or GIS, an Oracle based data collection system. The system monitors severe storm and tropical cyclone activity, local flooding, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic activity, drought, wildfires and technological disasters. Each of these disasters produce an associated effect that the PDC, via its GIS, can provide updates to emergency managers around the Asia-Pacific region.

For example, a hurricane or typhoon will produce a complex set of severe effects including high winds, a storm surge, torrential rains and flooding. The PDC can assist with communications between emergency response teams and local authorities, mapping not only the storm track but also flood zones and areas of wind damage.

The information can go as far as mapping the location of debris collection sites, land fills, waste water facilities, ice, water, lumber and incinerators. All items that become useful in the post-disaster clean-up stage.

Relevant information can be posted for many types of disasters such as the epicenter and severity of damage maps for earthquakes or ash cloud concentration and extent for volcanoes. This information can be correlated and made available via the Intranet for registered users and the Internet for the general public.

The PDC is also a working prototype of the Global Disaster Information Network (GDIN). This concept envisions the use of emerging information technologies, resources and collaborative approaches to effectively support emergency managers and help build sustainable communities around the world.

The problem for global emergency managers, as seen by the Board on Natural Disasters in January 1999, is an "inability to access information and the lack of standardization coordination and com-munications." GDIN is the beginning of a solution to reducing disaster losses through better information. According to the PDC, development of the system was predicated on the fact that the "emergency management community's needs far outstrip any single organization's information resources." It's envisioned that the collaboration, coordination and integration of information systems dedicated to emergency management will save lives, and reduce and prevent suffering and economic loss.

So, what is the PDC … really? It is an information-processing center with a great deal of resources, both internal and external, there to serve global emergency managers who are responsible for disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

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