Emergencies are unpredictable and rapidly changing events that require the coordinated efforts of professional responders with victims on the ground. When disaster strikes, emergency management services need access to real-time critical data to quickly identify the scale, scope, location, and people affected and mobilize the required resources for the best possible outcome.
Many tech entrepreneurs are stepping up to provide them with just that. The RapidSOS platform delivers critical emergency data from millions of connected devices and connected sources, including schools, enterprises, vehicles, and IoT devices to 911.
Founded in 2012 by Michael Martin and Nicholas Horelik, the goal was to enhance emergency response by providing 911 call centers with critical data that exceeds anything that traditional systems could deliver.
The idea for the business was sparked by Martin’s personal experience of being mugged in New York City. He says: “I grew up in a small town in Indiana and had never experienced an emergency. For the first time, I had to think about calling 911. I realized how hard it is to have a clear, coherent conversation in the middle of a life-and-death emergency, verbally speak and spell an address, and describe what the suspect looks like etc. That problem touched me personally.”
Martin and Horelik collaborated in grad school to work on a solution and over the following two years worked with thousands of 911 telecommunicators and first responders, gaining the input they needed to build RapidSOS. Today the company provides instant access to vital caller data in over 170 million emergencies annually.
Countering disaster strikes
Aurora 911, in Aurora, Colorado, started using RapidSOS in 2019. Before that, 911 technology limited the team to only identifying the cell tower being used and a location radius.
Director Tina Buneta says: “If a caller couldn’t provide their location verbally or by text, we weren’t to pinpoint their exact location. This created huge frustration for 911 professionals, who felt powerless to deploy life-saving resources to people who needed them. When RapidSOS provided this critical information, at no cost to 911, it felt almost miraculous for our industry.”
With the continued expansion of resources and data coming through the portal the team can quickly detect the caller’s location, their estimated floor level, their medical profile information stored on their mobile device (if the device owner has opted in), vehicle telematics if they have been involved in a crash, building floor plans and alarm data, fire sensor data, and security camera access for partner businesses and even schools.
Buneta adds: “My team experienced a call from a woman held captive in a moving vehicle. She couldn’t talk to us, but we were able to track her location dynamically, and alert law enforcement officials to the real-time location of her device until they were able to intercept the vehicle, save the victim and take the suspect into custody.”
In the U.S. currently, 99.7% of the population is covered by RapidSOS. The core service is provided free of charge to every public safety agency in the country with the option of paying for additional capabilities, such as real-time language translation if the caller doesn’t speak English. The platform also operates in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and the U.K., with plans for further global expansion.
“There were around two billion emergencies globally last year,” says Martin. “We are, touching around 8% of the problem today. The capability now exists in every smartphone, and we have to scale that out across the public safety side of the platform.”
Battling natural disaster
In the last four months of 2024, hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton devastated parts of the south-east United States, including Florida, where public safety platform Peregrine Technologies played a key role in supporting the Office of Emergency Management (OEM).
Peregrine’s data integration platform takes highly fractured, disparate data to build a complete historical and real-time picture that can be fed into a centralized analytical platform, allowing people to construct analyses and test ideas.
Founded by Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph, the company’s origins lie in law enforcement, helping local police forces solve crimes, however, its transition to helping to counter natural disasters has made it an additional emergency service that enables first responders and others in the front line to make better decisions.
CEO Noone, who called on his earlier experience at Palantir Technologies to develop tools that support law enforcement and public safety personnel in the field, says: “This progression occurred because of our established presence among the multi-disciplinary personnel and emergency management or federal task forces collaborating on problem-solving. They need a means of dynamically integrating with all these fractured systems to perform agile search and analysis.
“Take the Los Angeles fires, for example, where the pressure is on the mayor of Los Angeles, the emergency managers and county-level officials or operators. While millions of dollars of funding may be coming from the state of California to support the firefighting effort, the people making the strategic decisions are on the ground and that’s a very important nuance when it comes to who needs the right data at the right times.”
Natural disaters
When the hurricanes hit Florida, Peregrine played a vital role in pre-storm planning assessments of streets and homes most at risk and using historical hurricane data and the topography of the county to see which communities were most at risk.
“The challenge is when hundreds of 911 calls come in at once, and you need to prioritize those calls, identify what resources they need, and from an evacuation standpoint, ensure that we’ve signaled to people that they should be out of those zones,” says Noone.
Real-time data gathering
Jodie Fiske runs the Manatee County (Florida) Emergency Response team and led the effort against Hurricane Debbie, Helene, and Milton. She says: “Before Peregrine, we had access to all this data, however, we had to go through multiple data sources to get a common operating picture. With Peregrine, we can rapidly gather all of our critical data and create a complete station report with just a few dashboards.”
As she explains, dealing with hurricane prep involves prepping sandbag stations and shelters, etc., before landfall, however, there are challenges in tracking shelter capacity and who is coming into the shelter.
“For larger storms like Helene and Milton, we might have seven or eight shelters. There are no windows in the Emergency Operations Center, so we are not watching what’s happening outside,” adds Fiske. “Peregrine’s unique value proposition was in its real-time information data gathering.”
The technology allowed the team to review evacuation data to identify trends, for example, the peak when people were evacuating and when landfall was happening and understand when they needed to push evacuations harder to achieve better numbers in the future, something they hadn’t been able to do previously.
Mike Rahn, chair of the Manatee County Board of County Commissioners, says: “There is still much we can do with Peregrine fully deployed, with data from our computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and other systems integrated and enriched. But I do know Manatee County residents and first responders alike will be safer thanks to this.”
Fiske says: “The faster we have this information, the faster we can substantiate our damages, and the faster that money goes to our residents who need the help.”
As a result, Manatee was the first county to receive expedited reimbursement for debris pickup. When disaster strikes, the technology developed by firms like Peregrine and RapidSOS brings is critical from beginning to end.
This post was originally published on here
