Interoperability

Lack of Standardization and Compatibility

However, the complexity of recent high-impact crises such as 9/11 in the United States, the southeast Asian tsunami (2004), the suicide bombing of the London transport system (2005), Hurricane Katrina (2005), the Mumbai terrorist attack (2008), the Haiti earthquake (2010), floods in central Europe (2010), and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami (2011) has focused the need for the emergency services and other agencies to have an interoperable capability when responding to these types of crises in order to better safeguard the communities they serve. But the fragmented makeup of the various agencies involved has revealed a lack of standardization in relation to equipment and procedures across geographic and organizational boundaries that has made this very difficult. Therefore, in some quarters, interoperability in the civilian domain has come to mean the capability of organizations or parts of organizations to exchange operational information and to use it to inform decision making. But it is arguably wider than that. Crises and disasters do not respect national borders and often have cross-border consequences, for example, the southeast Asian tsunami and the central European floods; [Page 542]alternatively, crises such as the Haiti earthquake attract response and recovery teams from many countries, each with their own equipment and procedures. Therefore, the aim of interoperability should be to have compatible processes and procedures in order to bring about a multiagency response that is both effective and efficient. Communities deserve no less.

Clear situational awareness is a key factor for the effectiveness of crises, disaster, and emergency operations It is based on the compilation of information collected from the different teams of responders, sometimes from different countries, speaking different languages. The building of situational awareness relies on the accurate and timely exchange of information in a manner that is understood by all. The aim of interoperability is to give all those who might respond to such events the ability to communicate in a common language across national, state, and local boundaries.

U.S. Navy machinist Joel Rivera of the Deep Submergence Unit descends a hatch during a submarine rescue exercise with the Russian submarine SSK Alrosa in the Mediterranean Sea, June 7, 2011. Bold Monarch is a submarine rescue exercise sponsored by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that supports interoperability between all submarine rescue units. The 12-day exercise is held every three years and involves ships, submarines, and aircraft from both NATO and non-NATO countries, including Russia.

The report into 9/11 highlighted, among other things, the lack of interdepartmental compatibility in communications. The New York City's Office of Emergency Management (OEM), set up by former mayor Rudy Giuliani, was, as part of its function, intended to monitor emergency communications during a crisis, but on the fateful day it was unable to coordinate the activities [Page 543]of the multiple responders because the New York police and fire departments viewed themselves as autonomous. Also, the OEM Crisis Management Center was located within the World Trade Center complex and was destroyed when the buildings collapsed. Consequently, this inability to communicate across organizational boundaries clearly cost lives when police helicopters circling overhead predicted the collapse of the North Tower, a view that was not communicated to the fire department.

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