When Disaster Strikes, First Come the Tech Guys

NEW YORK — Alpha Bah isn't your typical telephone repairman or tech support guy.

He was held by rebels while working for the United Nations in his native country of Sierra Leone. In Sri Lanka, he led a team that provided satellite links for aid workers in communities smashed by the Southeast Asian tsunami. While mounting antennas on Iraqi rooftops, his job description included dropping low at the sound of gunfire.

Bah is one of a handful of telecommunications specialists who rush to humanitarian emergencies around the globe, often arriving before better-known first responders bring food, medicine and security.

While their work is largely invisible to the public, these experts lay the technology groundwork vital to modern relief operations amid the chaos of war and natural disaster.

"We are normally the first to hit the ground," said Bah, 38, an emergency telecom officer based in Rome for the U.N. World Food Program.

"It's quite a challenge for the humanitarian community to mount an effective response without any communication tools," he said. "If they're moving food trucks or convoys, if they had to go to camps with refugees — if they cannot communicate back with their bases about what needs to be done, the job becomes impossible."

Just as cell phones and broadband have remade everyday communications, technology has changed the way relief organizations deliver help in the wake of disaster.

Within a day or two of an earthquake or hurricane, tiny and nimble teams may be on the ground, assessing the damage, building radio networks and setting up portable satellite terminals and Wi-Fi hot spots in remote jungles or mountain villages.

This work received a boost last year with the creation of the Rapid Response Emergency Telecommunication project. It is funded by the charitable arm of the mobile telecom giant Vodafone and the United Nations Foundation, which was created in 1998 with Ted Turner's $1 billion gift to the U.N.

The project has helped the World Food Program, a lead U.N. agency for providing emergency communications, train tech responders to face challenges beyond the realm of crashed computers and misbehaving cell phones.

The first class graduated in March after training in Italy. It included veterans like Bah and other tech types who learned not only stress management and team building, but how to survive snipers, mine fields and kidnapping.

The training, for U.N. personnel and other relief responders, helps prepare people with technology backgrounds who are "thrust there out on the ground to try to get these vital communications systems up and running," said U.N. Foundation spokeswoman Adele Waugaman.

The value of technology is being felt across the emergency aid community.

Leading nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, have formed the NetHope consortium to share technology information, skills and resources to better serve humanitarian causes. NetHope's corporate supporters include Microsoft and Cisco Systems.

The U.N. Foundation and the Vodafone Group Foundation have so far given more than $2.7 million to their emergency communications project.

The money also supports a partnership with the group Telecoms Without Borders, better known in French as Telecoms Sans Frontieres or TSF.

Along with the World Food Program teams, TSF has become the leading edge of the U.N. response to a disaster, often remaining on the scene for up to 30 days before turning the work over to other agencies.

Founded in 1998, TSF has about a dozen full-time staff members, 40 volunteers and teams always on call. They often hop commercial flights, bringing portable communications systems anywhere in the world within 48 hours.

"The smallest minimum telecom center we have can actually fit in the carry-on baggage," said TSF's Oisin Walton, describing the laptop-sized satellite terminals and wireless routers that become a lifeline for U.N., government and NGO relief workers.

"It's more than a cyber cafe," Walton said. "It's a full package including Internet, voice and fax lines and information technology support."

He said aid workers use the centers to coordinate in the field and "send reports back saying, 'this is the list of medicine we need, this is the amount of houses destroyed, this is when we need the next helicopter.' "

Bigger and more robust equipment arrives in the following days and weeks, he said.

With bases in France, Nicaragua and Thailand, the group recently responded to the August earthquake in Peru, Hurricane Felix's hit on Central America and flooding in Ghana.

TSF also provides phone service to people directly affected by a disaster. These survivors often reach out to distant loved ones to share news or ask for money or other help.

Walton, who was with the first TSF team into Sri Lanka after the December 2004 tsunami, said people lined up to use a satellite phone at a mosque that had been converted into a camp.

"We had people one after the other telling of everything they'd lost, of all their family that died," he said. Walton said there are happy stories, too, of people who survived, of families reunited.

"A three-minute call can really make a difference," he said.

While TSF handles the immediate aftermath of a disaster, the World Food Program also faces longer communications challenges as it delivers food to remote areas by ship, helicopter, air drops and even on the backs of elephants and donkeys.

At the peak of an operation in Iraq, the WFP delivered 750,000 tons of food in a month, which is about 1,000 tons of food on 50 trucks every hour, said Gianluca Bruni, chief of the WFP's emergency technology and telecom response group.

"You can imagine what coordinating and putting together an operation like this means in the middle of Iraq," he said. "You can imagine the need to keep track always of everyone wherever they go, whatever they do. That's what we enable. That's what we do."

On the Web:

U.N. Foundation emergency telecom: unfoundation.org/vodafone/rapid_response_emergency_tele.asp

TSF: www.tsfi.org/tsfispip/index.php?lang=en

NetHope: www.nethope.org