An automated emergency alert system currently used at the Pentagon
originally was designed for cable companies that wanted technicians
to receive immediate notification of service disruptions in particular
areas.
The system, called the Communicator, is installed at five command
centers at the Pentagon and proved its usefulness on September 11,
when a hijacked airliner struck the building. Thousands of people
were instructed to evacuate the area via messages that the Communicator
was programmed to send to individual pagers, cell phones, personal
digital assistants and whatever other means of electronic communications
were available.
“This system alerts everyone at the speed of light, so everyone
knows where to go, what the problem is and what to do,” said
Van Hipp, a defense industry consultant. He said that, a few days
after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, government
officials had the system installed at the White House.
The Communicator is used at 1,100 sites in 22 countries, said David
Zadick, president of Dialogic Systems, the company that manufactures
the system.
Most people already have many communications devices, Zadick said.
The Communicator is designed to work with any of those devices.
“It’s a sergeant in a box.”
In traditionally military settings, he explained, a sergeant sits
at a desk with an emergency response booklet. When an emergency
happens, he has to look up the instructions in the book and figure
out whom he needs to call.
“The Communicator does the same thing, but rather than calling
one person, it connects to many different phone lines, simultaneously.”
A 12-line system, for example, can contact up to 100 people within
five minutes. A 72-line system can reach 600 users.
“This system can be bought off the shelf, but there are certain
capabilities that we only make available to U.S. military clients,”
said Zadick. The company started out in the late 1980s, providing
systems to cable companies that allowed customers to call and report
service disruptions. “Our machine answered the phones and
diagnosed what part of the cable was possibly broken. Our system
would go and wake up a technician and notify him,” he said.
The system then automatically called the customers to verify that
the cable was working again.
A nuclear plant in New Jersey subsequently sought the technology
as a means to alert its 150 technicians, in cases of emergencies.
“Most of the nuclear reactors in America put these systems
in,” said Zadick. The U.S. Army was the company’s first
military customer. The service wanted to use the alert system for
its chemical arsenals around the country.
One advantage that the Communicator offers, he said, is that it
dials phone numbers much more quickly than humans can. It dials
a phone number in 7/10th of a second and retries, endlessly, Zadick
said. “Mathematically, the Communicator will always be successful
in a competitive environment, to get calls out.” On September
11, the cellular phone networks were overloaded and service was
disrupted in many areas. If cell phones and paging services are
out, the Communicator takes advantage of whatever technology is
still standing.